Sometimes I wish I were as smart the E*TRADE baby.
That’s not meant to be a joke, either.
When you see the investment firm’s ads on TV, the message isn’t subtle: Our financial tools are so good, a baby can use them and be successful.
Amazingly enough, when I started testing the murky waters of finances, I discovered there wasn’t a magical application that could spell it all out for me.
In lieu of magic, UCLA should consider establishing a new general education requirement that mandates all students to take a financial literacy course in order to better prepare them for life after college.
It would be a new experience for me and no doubt for many others. For all my supposed education, only once did I ever receive a course in “financial literacy.” And that class was in seventh grade – I learned to write a check.
Because why learn to save money when you can spend it?
Unfortunately, I’m not alone. A 2008 survey on personal financial literacy from the nonprofit Jump$tart Coalition found that, among 1,030 full-time college students, the mean score on finance-related topics was 62 percent or, by test standards, a D.
The topics covered on the test ranged from automobile insurance, the taxes deducted from paychecks, compounding interest and savings and student loans, cornerstones of building a life outside of college.
In fairness, the study included students from every year, and you would expect a college senior to know more about finances than a college freshman. To an extent, they did.Seniors scored a whopping 65 percent.
I asked Mary Johnson, director of financial literacy and student aid policy at Higher One, a group dedicated to ensuring easier access to higher education for students, about how she might format a curriculum for a financial literacy class.
She said the course would cover everything from student loans to establishing credit, building savings and emergency funds, as well as identifying good job offers and forming a budget.
Kevin Kennis, a fourth-year applied math student and the vice president of MoneyThink at UCLA, a nonprofit organization that specializes in teaching financial literacy to underprivileged high schoolers, said he also believes college students could use a class like the one he teaches.
He said his curriculum would focus on start-up costs for life – budgeting, figuring out whether to rent or buy property and finding out what percentage of your income you want to save and spend.
But to create a new requirement course for financial literacy is not as easy as waving a wand. Last year, a new GE called “Community and Conflict in the Modern World” died at one of the earliest stages of ratification.
The details are tricky, and it’s easy to draw generalizations, but UCLA should look into establishing a financial literacy requirement, complicated as it may be.
UCLA – and many universities like it – continues to do a disservice to its student body by continuing to matriculate students who may be financially illiterate. Many students leave the university without this basic life skill, a situation the administration should work quickly to remedy.