The Economist examines the challenges facing efforts to improve high-school students’ financial literacy:
First, boosting financial literacy is hard. Jump$tart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy, an American non-profit organization, has surveyed high-school seniors every other year since 2000. These surveys consistently show that students who have taken a full-semester course in personal finance do no better on a standard financial literacy test than those who have not taken such a course. Similarly, a study by Tzu-Chin Martina Peng and her co-authors found that having taken a personal finance course in school is unrelated to investment knowledge.
Second, and perhaps most important, courses in personal finance do not appear to have an impact on adult behavior.
As Buttonwood has pointed out, the knowledge that students acquire in school when they are in their teens does not necessary translate into action when they have to deal with mortgages and credit-card payments later in life. One study, for example, found that financial education has no impact on household saving behaviour. As a paper by Lewis Mandell and Linda Schmid Klein suggests, the long-term effectiveness of high-school classes in financial literacy is highly doubtful. It may simply be the case that the gap in time is too wide between when individuals acquire their financial knowledge, as high-school students, and when they’re in a position to apply what they have learned.
The Dish 