Cheers to a terrific week in progress, ForbesBLK. Jabari here.
I am writing to you freshly removed from my first major surgery — a wisdom tooth removal. It’s weird having a hole in your gums. I can’t accurately describe the feeling, but it’s almost like chewing extra soggy cereal. It feels yucky.
My personal health issue aside, we’re nearing the end of Financial Literacy Month. This themed month isn’t as prominent as others, like Black History Month or Breast Cancer Awareness Month. But it should be, considering the U.S. seems to be regressing in financial education.
According to a money quiz, “Are you financially smarter than a 12th grader?,” which fintech platform Goalsetter gave to 1,000 undergraduates from schools including Stanford, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, it’s bad across social classes. The quiz consists of 15 high-school-level questions concerning financial education. The students answered only 51% of the questions correctly.
“We have students who are at the top universities in the country who aren’t even understanding concepts like compound interest versus simple interest and the 50-30-20 budgeting rule,” says Tanya Van Court, Goalsetter’s CEO. “We’re regressing. The purpose of that quiz is to demonstrate that it is all of us.”
