Why High Schools Are Finally Teaching Personal Finance

The Wall Street Journal ran a story recently with a headline I did not expect to see in my lifetime: personal finance is now cool in high school. Thirty-nine states require a personal-finance course to graduate, four of them added since 2024, and the subject has quietly passed economics in the classroom. Texas, California, and Indiana went so far as to swap their standalone economics requirements for personal finance.

My first reaction was to cheer. My second was to wonder what on earth took so long.

For most of my career, the odds that an American teenager would learn what a mutual fund is, or how the stock market actually works, were close to zero. I remember walking past my daughter while she did her homework one evening and asking what she was studying. The answer had something to do with French Renaissance art. There is nothing wrong with knowing French Renaissance art. But it struck me then, and it still does, that we will happily teach a sixteen-year-old about painters from five centuries ago and then send her into adulthood without ever explaining what a stock is, or why a small amount set aside early can grow into a great deal later.

I want to be fair to economics, because it is worth teaching. It helps people understand how markets and incentives work, and there is good evidence it makes for more engaged citizens. This was never supposed to be a contest with a winner and a loser. But for the ordinary business of a person’s life, knowing what a credit score is and how to protect it, or what a 401(k) does, or why investment fees quietly matter so much, tends to land harder than the theory behind a supply curve. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that people who received mandatory financial education in high school went on to make measurably better money decisions, including paying down high-cost credit-card debt.

The stakes are not abstract. Student debt in this country has swelled to $1.7 trillion. In one Brooklyn classroom the Journal visited, students ran the real cost of the colleges they hoped to attend through a loan calculator and watched the monthly payments appear on their laptops, some north of $1,700 a month. That is a number worth facing at seventeen, before the ink is dry, rather than at twenty-three when the first bill arrives. Add a world of sports-betting apps engineered to be hard to put down, and a job market where more young people work for themselves with no human-resources department to set up their retirement plan, and you have a generation asked to make serious financial decisions at the exact moment they have been taught the least about money.

My son likes to needle me by saying I have spent my career trying to save the world one investor at a time. He is teasing, but he is not entirely wrong about the impulse. Helping people invest their own money well has been the thread running through everything I have done for forty years. And one line from the Journal’s story stopped me, because I have heard it in person more times than I can count. A teacher who has taught personal finance for years said that no matter the student’s age or background, they all eventually tell her the same thing. I wish I had this in high school.

That sentence is the reason I wrote Investing 101.

It is a five-part series, in plain language, for someone who has never invested and has no idea where to begin. No jargon, no assumptions, nothing to sell. It moves through the five questions a real beginner actually asks, in the order they ask them. Why does investing even work? Where do I put my money? What do I actually buy? How do I put it together. And how do I keep from tripping over my own feet. There is a companion FAQ for the practical questions that come right after, the ones about Roth versus traditional accounts, or what to do when the market falls.

I wrote it with that seventeen-year-old in mind, the one about to sign a loan for a school whose payments she has never calculated. But I also wrote it for the thirty-five-year-old who feels behind, and for the parent who wants to explain this to a kid and quietly realizes no one ever explained it to them either. You are not too old to get the education you missed. The best time to learn this was in a classroom you never had. The next best time is today.

If the schools are finally coming around, good. Late beats never by a wide margin. In the meantime the series is here, it costs nothing, and it begins with the most basic question of all. Start with Part 1, Why Investing Works, and go at your own pace.