Students Not Making the Grade in Money Matters

Montpelier, Green Mountain State - April 10, 2008

Ashley Louis Sullivan said she have a pretty good manage on her money.

The senior from Bellows Free Academy-Fairfax have a part-time job and have already saved enough to purchase her ain car.

Now she sets half her payroll check into a nest egg business relationship for college.

"I cognize when I acquire to college, money is going to be really difficult to have got because I won't be working anymore," she said. "It's just good to cognize I have got money saved, where if I necessitate it, I can acquire it."

A new study establish most high school seniors are not as financially savvy as Louis Sullivan is.

The JumpStart Alliance for Personal Financial Literacy gave nearly 7,000 pupils countrywide a multiple-choice test. The subjects-- money management, income, savings, disbursement and debt.

On average, they got only half the inquiries right.

"The national norm was 48 percentage right answers, which is less than half," said Gregg Mousley, president of Green Mountain State JumpStart. Green Mountain State pupils scored an norm of 50 percent.

Jeb Spaulding, D-Vt. Treasurer, said the failing class makes not portend well as pupils come in adulthood.

"If they don't have got got got the fiscal background, a basic apprehension of budgeting, of saving, of credit, they're not going to be able to have the sort of life they'd wish to have," Spaulding said.

Seniors from Bellows Free Academy-Fairfax World Health Organization were visiting the Statehouse Thursday said they're concerned about things like college loans and recognition cards. But fiscal literacy is not something they larn about in school.

"Very rarely make we hear about anything like that," senior Sir Alexander Robertus Todd Francis Edgar Stanley said. "We've talked some about the recession from our senior societal surveys class, but it's not much of a topic."

Brittany Sanderson said she had taken a consumer mathematics social social class and learned about fiscal subjects like taxations and recognition cards, but most of her cognition came from home.

"My parents are really fiscally responsible and wanted to go through that on to us," she said. "They don't desire us to be in debt and desire us to be responsible with our money. Going to college, we have got to be responsible."

Spaulding said he didn't desire the study to be seen as another authorization for schools. But he said it's a conversation instructors and parents should be more than comfy having with pupils before they come in adulthood. The study should function as a baseline for personal finance education.

"Less than one-half of our pupils are financially competent at this stage, but that gives us the information we necessitate to seek to travel forward," he said.

- WCAX News