The Percentage of Students Receiving Personal Finance Education
When you graduated from high school, did you know how to create a budget? Did you have an understanding of what stocks and bonds were? Did you know how to do your own taxes?
For many Americans, the answer to these questions is probably a “no”. Only 22.7% of U.S. high school students are guaranteed to receive a personal finance education. While this is up from 16.4% in 2018, this still represents a small fraction of students.
This graphic uses data from Next Gen Personal Finance (NGPF) to show the percentage of high school students required to take a personal finance course by state.
A Closer Look at State-level Personal Finance Education
A standalone personal finance course was defined as a course that was at least one semester, which is equivalent to 60 consecutive instructional hours. Here’s the percentage of students in each state who have a required (not optional) personal finance course.
State/Territory | % of Students Required to Take Personal Finance Course |
---|---|
Mississippi | 100.0% |
Missouri | 100.0% |
Virginia | 100.0% |
Tennessee | 99.7% |
Alabama | 99.6% |
Utah | 99.6% |
Iowa | 91.3% |
North Carolina | 89.2% |
Oklahoma | 47.1% |
New Jersey | 43.0% |
Nebraska | 42.8% |
Kansas | 40.8% |
Wyoming | 38.3% |
Arkansas | 34.6% |
Wisconsin | 33.5% |
South Dakota | 27.1% |
Ohio | 23.5% |
Pennsylvania | 16.2% |
Maine | 15.6% |
Rhode Island | 14.8% |
Connecticut | 14.7% |
Illinois | 13.9% |
Maryland | 12.5% |
North Dakota | 12.2% |
Vermont | 12.1% |
Nevada | 11.0% |
Indiana | 10.9% |
Oregon | 7.5% |
Minnesota | 6.9% |
Montana | 6.9% |
New Hampshire | 6.0% |
Kentucky | 5.5% |
Colorado | 5.4% |
Delaware | 5.0% |
Massachusetts | 5.0% |
West Virginia | 3.2% |
(Read more...) |