In 2024, my son Matthew graduated from an A-rated high school in Central Florida. He’s smart and hardworking, headed to the University of Central Florida to study finance and accounting.
He never took a class on how money works.
Twenty-six years earlier, I graduated from a different high school in a different state. I also never took a class on how money works. I went on to earn an accounting degree and become a CPA.
Here’s what gets me: Matthew’s accountancy program at UCF doesn’t include a personal finance course. Neither did mine. So it’s not just that high school curriculum stayed the same across a generation. The college requirements did too.
A generation passed. The curriculum evolved in dozens of ways. But this one gap stayed exactly the same—from kindergarten through a bachelor’s degree in accounting.
I used to think that was a failure—that someone dropped the ball, that the system broke down. But the more I’ve learned about how education policy actually works, the more I’ve come to a different conclusion.
The system didn’t fail. It’s functioning exactly as designed. And the reason nothing changed in 26 years is simple: no one with power had any reason to change it.
The Missing Lobby
When you look at subjects that did make it into the curriculum over the past few decades, a pattern emerges. Each one had a powerful advocate.
Driver’s education had the insurance industry and state highway safety departments pushing for it. Sex education had public health organizations responding to teen pregnancy and STI rates. Computer science had the tech industry—companies like Microsoft, Google, and Apple—funding initiatives, training teachers, and lobbying state legislatures.
These subjects didn’t just appear because they were important. They appeared because someone with resources and influence decided to make them happen.
Financial literacy has no equivalent. There’s no industry that profits from a financially educated population pushing for this. There’s no organized parent lobby. There’s no federal agency with the authority to mandate it.
Students—the people who would benefit most—can’t vote. Parents are scattered and focused on dozens of competing priorities. Teachers aren’t lobbying for more content to squeeze into an already crowded day.
The result is a subject that everyone agrees matters in the abstract, but no one with power prioritizes in practice.
Who Benefits from the Status Quo
Here’s where it gets uncomfortable.
Financial literacy education doesn’t just lack advocates. It has silent opponents—institutions that benefit, whether intentionally or not, from widespread financial confusion.
Think about how credit cards work. The companies that issue them make money in two ways: merchant fees when you swipe, and interest when you carry a balance. A customer who pays their bill in full every month is far less profitable than one who doesn’t understand how interest compounds.
These aren’t shadowy institutions operating in secret. The major credit card issuers are publicly traded companies. They have a legal obligation to maximize returns for shareholders. That’s not a criticism—it’s how the system is designed. But it means their incentives are structural, not incidental. A more financially literate customer base would mean lower interest revenue. No CEO is going to present that trade-off to their board as a win.
Research from the National Bureau of Economic Research confirms what you might suspect: financial firms often have incentives to exploit consumer shortcomings rather than correct them. In one study, researchers found that credit card companies don’t randomly assign teaser rates—they target offers to consumers who are more likely to carry balances after the promotional period ends. They’re not educating customers. They’re identifying the ones who will pay the most in interest.
It’s not just credit cards. Payday lenders cluster in low-income neighborhoods where financial literacy rates are lowest. Banks design fee structures that penalize confusion—overdraft fees, minimum balance penalties, account maintenance charges. Two-thirds of the fees generated by certain credit card behaviors come from the least financially literate cardholders, even though they represent less than a third of the cardholder population.
I want to be careful here. I’m not suggesting a coordinated conspiracy to keep Americans financially ignorant. That’s not how systems work. What I’m describing is simpler and harder to fight: misaligned incentives.
The financial services industry doesn’t need to oppose financial literacy education. They just need to not fund it, not lobby for it, not make it a priority. And they don’t.
Meanwhile, the people who would benefit from that education—students, young adults, families trying to build wealth—don’t have lobbyists. They don’t have trade associations. They don’t write checks to political campaigns.
The incentives are stacked. And the stacking isn’t accidental.
The Illusion of Federal Action
If you go looking for evidence that the federal government takes financial literacy seriously, you’ll find something called the Financial Literacy and Education Commission. It sounds impressive. Twenty-three federal agencies. Chaired by the Secretary of the Treasury. A mandate from Congress to improve financial literacy across the country.
But look closer, and the picture changes.
The FLEC has no budget. It has no dedicated staff. It has no authority to mandate anything in any school district in America.
What does it do? It holds three public meetings a year. It publishes an annual report to Congress. It maintains a website called MyMoney.gov with links to resources from member agencies. It coordinates. It convenes. It discusses.
What it cannot do is require a single state to teach financial literacy. It cannot fund curriculum development. It cannot train teachers. It cannot hold anyone accountable for outcomes.
The FLEC has existed since 2003. In that time, it has produced reports, strategies, and frameworks. It has not produced a generation of financially literate Americans.
This is what policy theater looks like. The appearance of action without the substance. The federal government can say it has a commission on financial literacy. But that commission has no power to change what happens in classrooms.
And so nothing changes.
Why Schools Don’t Push for It
Even if the federal government wanted to prioritize financial literacy, it couldn’t force schools to teach it. Education is a state and local matter. The real decisions happen in state legislatures, state boards of education, and district offices.
So why don’t schools push for it themselves?
The answer comes down to time, testing, and accountability.
Since No Child Left Behind in 2001, American public schools have operated under intense pressure to improve performance on standardized tests. Those tests focus on reading and math. Later, science was added. The tests don’t cover financial literacy.
When a subject isn’t tested, it doesn’t count toward the metrics that determine whether a school is succeeding or failing. Teachers aren’t evaluated on it. Principals aren’t held accountable for it. Funding isn’t tied to it.
In that environment, every minute spent on financial literacy is a minute not spent on something that will be measured. Schools face a zero-sum calculation, and financial literacy loses.
Adding to the problem: you can’t just add content to the school day without removing something else. The schedule is finite. Teachers are already stretched thin. Proposing a new required course means proposing that something else become optional—and every existing subject has its own defenders.
The path of least resistance is to keep things as they are. Teach what’s tested. Skip what isn’t.
That’s not a decision anyone makes consciously. It’s the cumulative effect of a system that rewards certain outcomes and ignores others. Financial literacy falls into the gap between what matters and what’s measured.
The Grassroots Exception
There are people fighting to change this. They deserve credit.
Organizations like Next Gen Personal Finance, the Jump$tart Coalition, and the Council for Economic Education have been pushing for state-level mandates for years. They develop curriculum. They train teachers. They lobby legislatures. They’ve had real wins.
As of 2024, more than half of U.S. states have some requirement for personal finance education in high schools—up from a handful a decade ago. A growing number require a standalone course for graduation rather than just embedding financial topics in other subjects.
This is progress. It’s happening because dedicated people are doing the unglamorous work of state-by-state advocacy, showing up at committee hearings, building coalitions, and refusing to give up.
But more needs to be done. A single high school course—often just a half-credit requirement—cannot adequately cover what students need to know. Budgeting, credit, debt, taxes, insurance, investing, retirement planning, consumer protection. These topics deserve more than a semester squeezed between sophomore and senior year. Personal finance education needs to start earlier, go deeper, and be reinforced over time. A standalone course is a start, not a solution.
And even that start faces a mismatch. Volunteer energy and nonprofit budgets against institutional inertia and competing priorities. For every state that passes a mandate, there are others where bills stall in committee, where implementation is weak, where the requirement exists on paper but not in practice.
The grassroots movement is proof that change is possible. It’s also proof of how hard that change is when the system’s incentives don’t support it.
What Would It Take?
The incentive problem isn’t that the wrong people are in charge. It’s that the right people have no incentive to act.
Changing that requires building something that doesn’t yet exist: a constituency for financial literacy education with enough power to shift the political calculus.
That might mean parents organizing at the state level the way they’ve organized around other education issues. It might mean employers—who bear real costs when their workers struggle with financial stress—becoming advocates for better preparation. It might mean tying financial literacy to outcomes that policymakers already care about, like graduation rates, college completion, or workforce readiness.
It definitely means recognizing that awareness isn’t enough. Everyone already knows financial literacy matters. What’s missing isn’t understanding—it’s leverage.
The gap between my high school education and Matthew’s didn’t persist because people forgot. It persisted because the forces that could have closed it had no reason to try.
Until those incentives change, the gap will remain. Another generation will graduate without the knowledge they need. And we’ll keep wondering why the system doesn’t fix itself.
It won’t. Systems don’t fix themselves. People with power fix systems when they have a reason to.
The question is whether we can give them one.
Sources
- Financial Literacy and Education Commission, Strategy for Assuring Financial Empowerment (SAFE) Report, Fiscal Year 2023-2024
- Hastings, Madrian, and Skimmyhorn, “Financial Literacy, Financial Education, and Economic Outcomes,” NBER Working Paper Series, 2012
- Lusardi and Mitchell, “The Economic Importance of Financial Literacy: Theory and Evidence,” Journal of Economic Literature, 2014
- Lusardi and Tufano, “Debt Literacy, Financial Experiences, and Overindebtedness,” NBER Working Paper, 2009
- Gale and Levine, “Financial Literacy: What Works? How Could It Be More Effective?” Brookings Institution, 2010
- Next Gen Personal Finance, State of Financial Education Report, 2024