Throughout the time spent in school, it is ideal that all the skills we learn will help us for when we graduate and are thrown into adulthood. However, most of the skills we learn won’t actually benefit us in the real world.  

Many students, once they graduate high school, often find themselves feeling lost and confused when it comes to surviving the real world. I believe that more high schools across the country should require students to take financial and life preparation classes for us to actually use after graduation. 

According to Positive Action, many high school graduates finish school not knowing how to manage credit cards, file taxes, or balance checkbooks, and much more. Classes must be encouraged for students to take to learn these very important skills needed for adulthood. 

Now some high schools, including East, offer classes that educate students about these skills. A few courses offered here at East include Personal Finance, Marketing Management, and Economics. Now this is a great opportunity for students; however, for the longest time the only one of these classes that were required for students to take was Economics. 

Starting this school year, East has made Personal Finance a required course for juniors. Although this does not exclude current seniors from the option of taking it as well, it is not required.  

Theoretically, Economics is a great class that can help prepare students for the future and inform us about how our economy is ran. However, from personal experience, Economics didn’t teach me, along with other students in the building, how to file taxes, manage a credit card, fill out a resume, and so much more that we actually need to know how to do for the real world.  

Luckily, now that personal finance is here, students can hopefully learn these some of these skills and more about how to manage and improve their financial futures. 

Another reason why learning about money management is so important is because most of us are going right into college after graduation. College is all about money and money management and just figuring out how to survive on your own. 

This is also why it is so easy for students to fall into debt. According to Positive Action, 71% of people in the U.S. are burdened by debt. 

This is why it is so necessary for us students to be taught these skills so we have some sort of guide going into college. It is so incredibly easy to fall deep into debt in college with how expensive it is, and on top of all of that, most of us are trying to figure out how to survive on our own for the first time ever. 

Possibly with just a little extra guidance about money management, it could financially save students. Unfortunately though, not every high school in the country is taking charge and helping prepare students for the long run by requiring or even offering these crucial classes. 

According to the Council for Economic Education (CEE), there are only six states in the U.S. that require students to take a separate financial class and as of right now, Nebraska, unfortunately, is not one of these six states. 

If students were better educated on these topics and more prepared, then it would make that transition into adulthood seem so much less scary and less stressful. In 2017, the National Financial Educators Council did a study and asked 1101 young adults ages 18-24 “what high school level course would benefit your life the most?” The majority (51.4%) responded and said “money management” as the course they thought would be most beneficial to their personal lives. 

The tradition of throwing young adults into the real world with very little preparation or knowledge on how to survive is not practical at all anymore, and I am sure older adults now would have appreciated it a lot if they were taught these important life skills in high school early on. 

An argument that people use is that we have the internet. With the click of a button anyone could Google and look up anything they want, which also makes it a lot easier to figure out these financial life skills on our own since we are not being taught them in school. 

Some of these skills however can be hard to figure out by ourselves, and when it comes to money we obviously don’t want to make the wrong choices that can financially hurt us in the future, just because we weren’t properly educated. Because everyone’s financial situations are different, sometimes using Google’s advice might not work out for everyone. 

Another argument people make is for these young adults to ask their parents, guardians or family members for help and advice. However, some people might not have this option, and sometimes the people in our lives also do not know much about these skills enough to help us make the best decisions. 

For the amount of time that we spend in school, both primary and secondary education, before we graduate and are thrown into the real world, schools should at least do us a favor and help prepare and educate us on what we actually need to know financially to survive as adults.