By Leia Green
Boston University News Service
How do you set up a long-term financial plan? How do you tackle credit card debt? How do you pay off your student loans?
These questions left over 100 students at Arlington High School stumped.
Yaxin Zhang, a senior at Arlington High and founder of financial literacy nonprofit Project 57, surveyed around 300 of her peers on their basic financial knowledge earlier this year.
She found that nearly all surveyed students felt financial education was important, around 30% were confident in their financial literacy skills and roughly 20% were actually financially literate.
Zhang presented her findings to the Legislature’s Committee of Education during a Sept. 16 hearing on a bill to require financial education in schools, backed by nonprofits, students and educators concerned young people are entering adult life financially ill-prepared.
“These survey results are symptoms, not the diagnosis,” said Zhang during her testimony. “The financial illiteracy epidemic will continue to spread across our districts if we continue to stagnate.”
The proposed legislation calls for the establishment of a financial literacy trust fund, fed by private and public sources, which would support mandatory financial literacy courses in elementary, middle and high schools across the state.
“It’s been a long-time coming,” said Cedric Turner, founder of financial education nonprofit Empower Yourself LTD. “There have been people pushing this for years.”
A slew of bills focused on ramping up youth financial education have been pitched in the past decade, but none have successfully instituted a financial literacy requirement.
While 35 states require high school students to take a course in personal finance to graduate, Massachusetts is not one of them.
“[We are] behind the eight ball on this,” said Ian MacKay, a personal finance teacher at Arlington High. “Massachusetts prides themselves on having a strong educational system, yet we fail in this area.”
If passed, the legislation would likely impel schools to funnel resources into recruiting and training finance and economic teachers.
“There is a financial cost to it, but most states do it,” said MacKay. “Massachusetts can do it too, if they so choose.”
Squeezing another mandatory course into tightly packed student schedules may prove to be a challenge, said Michael Kozuch, director of history and social studies at Arlington High.
“If this bill was to pass, the question would become what would we give up?” said Kozuch.
Despite potential obstacles, both Kozuch and MacKay believe financial education will help reduce the number of students tangled up in financial distress and crime.
In 2024, New Englanders lost over $446 million to internet crime, a 43% rise from 2023, with investment fraud responsible for the largest chunk of the losses, according to the 2024 FBI internet crime report. Massachusetts residents alone reported more than $338 million in losses.
“[Students] need to understand how the system works, so they are not vulnerable to corporations that want to take advantage of them,” said Kozuch.
Arlington High currently offers two personal finance courses, Introduction to Personal Finance and The Economics of Personal Finance. The latter is a Syracuse University Dual Enrollment course introduced to the school by MacKay around seven years ago.
Between 25 to 75 students typically take a personal finance course each year, said MacKay. This year, roughly 100 students enrolled.
Zhang said she has noticed an uptick in the number of young people seeking to understand financial systems.
“[Covid-19] exposed a lot of the economic weaknesses in our system, and the financial vulnerability of many families,” she said. “As we move into the Trump administration, there’s been a lot of confusion over student loans, tariffs, inflation, and the economy.”
When students do not elect to take an economics or finance class, they are left to learn about money from their parents.
MacKay said this can lead to significant equity issues, as children with financially irresponsible parents and no access to a basic financial education tend to inherit poor money habits.
“It’s the students who don’t think about money, who don’t care about money, they are more likely to find themselves in financial distress in their lives,” said MacKay. “I need to reach the students who aren’t being taught at home.”
This story originally appeared in Your Arlington.
