Nearing a diploma, most college students cannot handle many complex but common tasks, from understanding credit card offers to comparing the cost per ounce of food.
Those are the sobering findings of a study of literacy on college campuses, the first to target the skills of students as they approach the start of their careers.
More than 50 percent of students at four-year schools and more than 75 percent at two-year colleges lacked the skills to perform complex literacy tasks.
That means they could not interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit card offers with different interest rates and annual fees or summarize results of a survey about parental involvement in school.
The results cut across three types of literacy: analyzing news stories and other prose, understanding documents and having math skills needed for checkbooks or restaurant tips. [.continue.]

One thing the article touches on that I think is a huge problem is the lack of financial education taught in the school system. How to manage your money, how to build wealth, how to make smart decisions with you money. These things are very critical in determining how one lives after school. This is much more important than knowing the periodic table of elements, memorizing Othello or being able to use the Pythagorean Theorem. This is something that should be taught in high school. It isn’t, at least where/when I went and the class should be mandatory for all students. The college I am attending does offer a couple classes about building wealth and managing personal finances, but these are just electives thus being optional. Unfortunately for most people dealing with money is not optional.
For those that cant or wont take a class and need to know how to handle their money better check out Personal Finance for Dummies.

I had the first edition, but gave it to someone last year that got about as much education in school about managing money as I did, which was none.
Fourth edition is out and I am picking it up, probably the best $15 I’ll spend all month.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 22nd, 2006 at 12:39 pm and is filed under Money. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.