With NGPF’s Report being featured on CNBC’s Squawk Box last week, what’s getting educators and advocates squawking about this groundbreaking research?
NGPF’s Annual State of Financial Education Report were featured on CNBC’s Squawk Box last week. See the story below from legendary personal finance reporter Sharon Epperson, who interviewed NGPF’s Director of Educational Outreach, Yanely Espinal, for the story!
What makes NGPF’s State of Financial Education report so different?
Instead of relying on policy interpretation from stakeholders in each state, we check the ticker tape – ahem, the course catalog. Each school year since 2017-2018, our team has analyzed thousands of individual high school course catalogs (over 12,500 this year alone) to find what level of access each student has to personal finance courses and instruction.
Why do this painstaking, eye-straining work… school by school? The NGPF State of Financial Education Report helps educators, advocates, and policymakers more clearly understand the progress we’re making toward Mission 2030: our community’s goal that by the year 2030, all U.S. high school students will be guaranteed to take at least one semester course in personal finance before graduation. Plus, we got lots of help this year from our partner in this research, Dr. Carly Urban at Montana State University.
Dive in to NGPF’s State of Financial Education Report today!
1. 25 States representing over 53% of public high school students in the United States now guarantee all high schoolers will take a standalone personal finance course of at least one semester before graduation. Incredibly, that is up from 17 states representing 40% just 12 months ago.
The NGPF community’s advocacy efforts, led by NGPF’s affiliated nonprofit NGPF Mission 2030 Fund, are expanding guaranteed access to personal finance courses at an amazing pace, and we have more work to do. Check out pages 3 and 4 of this year’s report for more!
2. 10 states have fully implemented standalone personal finance course guarantees for the graduating class of 2024 and beyond, and the other 15 are in the process of implementing the guaranteed personal finance course for future graduating classes.
Understanding which implementation phase each state is in is crucial for:
- resource allocation,
- standards adoption,
- professional development plans,
- curriculum development efforts,
- staffing reallocation, and beyond.
For example, it doesn’t make sense for an education leader in a state that is is very early in its implementation to be using finite resources on curriculum development (especially because the most trusted personal finance curriculum is free and open for all educators). It may, however, make sense to use those resources to plan professional development and facilitate standards adoption.
Further along in implementation, education leaders should be laser-focused on professional development and staffing efforts.
Best of all, no state education leader has to go it alone. Check out NGPF’s 2023-2024 State of Financial Education Report for more detailed implementation insights from three states that have fully implemented this course!
3. Policies that require schools to embed personal finance instruction into other courses don’t get implemented equally.
This insight will be common sense for the educators reading this blog. When your state hands down a mandate to include a bunch of other content standards in your already crowded curriculum, you know how that goes. Yet, even in 2024, policymakers in several of the 26 states without the standalone graduation requirement are still suggesting this policy for personal finance: just jam it into some other course and call it a day.
We know this doesn’t work, but by examining course catalogs (instead of taking this policy at face value), the report shows exactly which students are missing out on financial education as a result of these watered-down policies.
It’s alarming but crucial evidence that allows all of us to make an even stronger case for standalone, guaranteed personal finance courses: the Gold Standard that all students deserve.
Thank you for reading and sharing this year’s report, and for advocating for #mission2030!
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