Top 5 Reasons Financial Literacy is Critical to Your Child’s Future

By 2031, at least 73% of U.S. public high school students will have to take a thorough, semester-long personal finance course to graduate. By then, it is projected that 30 states will have implemented new laws or regulations requiring such a course.

Absent regulatory or legislative action, Vermont students won’t be among these 11 million students from these 30 states. Unless we act, our young people will be at a disadvantage to their peers. They will lack the tools, knowledge, and skills to manage their money. That includes how to earn it, spend it, and save it.

Next spring, Champlain College’s Center for Financial Literacy will issue its sixth national report card. This includes a rating for how each state performs in personal finance education. You can read the Center’s 2023 Report Card and 2025 Interim Report Card on our website.

It is my fervent hope that in a future report Vermont will be moving up from its C grade in previous report cards, to the A grade that our young people need and deserve.

Vermont students are supposed to be getting this education. High schools are required to provide personal finance instruction consistent with national standards adopted by the Vermont State Board of Education in 2018. Vermont’s 52 supervisory unions currently decide what their graduation standards should be, but this balkanized approach to what a Vermont high school diploma means is about to change.

Beginning with the graduating class of 2031, the recently passed education reform bill, Act 73, requires the Secretary of Education and the State Board of Education to create statewide graduation standards for Vermont. This is the opportunity for Vermont to require equitable access to personal finance education to all its public high school students.

A March 2025 report issued by Next Gen Personal Finance indicates that only one out of five high school students in Vermont graduate from a high school that requires students to take a personal finance course prior to graduation.

Here are five reasons why our high school students cannot and should not be left behind, and why all Vermont students should have equitable access to a financial literacy course in public high schools:

1. The financial world we live in is incredibly complex and constantly evolving.

Young people need to budget and manage their income carefully. They must understand compound interest, how not to misuse credit, particularly student loans. They need to be knowledgeable about renting a home, mortgages, savings (particularly for retirement), investments, and insurance. New financial products and services are constantly introduced: crypto currencies, investing apps, peer-to-peer payment methods, buy-now-pay-later programs, etc. They also will face attempts at identity theft and other fraud schemes from numerous online sources including social media, texts, email, and websites.

2. Financial literacy education works, particularly in a standalone half-year high school course.

Numerous studies show that this type of education improves students’ financial capability by reducing credit defaults, increasing credit scores, and improving management of college student loans. Studies indicate that it even reduces the amount of credit card debt held by college students when they graduate.

Additionally, these studies have determined that this educational training works best when given in a full-semester course, as opposed to embedding these topics into other high school courses, like economics.

3. A personal finance course requirement is not expensive to implement.

Vermont has required our schools to teach personal finance to K-12 students consistent with national standards since 2018. So, requiring a standalone personal finance program in high school should be an incremental change for most high schools. A recent study indicates that more than half of Vermont high schools currently require students to take a course (22 percent) or offer an elective (37 percent). Excellent curriculum is free, for example the free Next Gen Personal Finance curriculum is used by more than 120,000 educators in the U.S. today. Vermont has about 24,000 students in public high school. About one-quarter of those students would need to take a personal finance course each year, approximately 6,000 students.

Assuming you need one trained educator for every 75 students trained, that results in the need for, at most, 80 trained educators. Currently, there are at least 30 educators that have been teaching personal finance for years in Vermont. The cost of training for 50 existing educators (math, social studies, and business educators) in not very high.

4. High School is the right place for this type of education.

High school is the best and most logical place to deliver personal finance education to all of America’s youth. They should have solid personal finance instruction before they leave high school and enter the workforce, the military, or attend post-secondary degree institutions.

5. Financial literacy pays

Giving students this education will help reduce the interest rate credit costs they may pay due to a low credit score in the future. It may also make it more likely that they will start saving early for their retirement. A 2024 study shows that the national average lifetime benefit of taking a personal finance course in high school is $100,000, and is estimated to be $94,000 in Vermont. People with higher levels of financial literacy are more likely to have rainy day funds and are less financially fragile. A recent FINRA Financial Capability Study indicates that only 48% of Vermonters have emergency funds that would cover three months of life’s necessities, and that one-out-of-five Vermonters could not come up with $2,000, from any source, in an emergency.

This is a golden opportunity for Vermont guarantee that every Vermont high school graduate student will take a substantive standalone course in personal finance, beginning with the Class of 2031.

Like many Vermonters, I hope change is coming.

That is why the Center for Financial Literacy, with support from EastRise, has created a free online personal finance training program that is open to all Vermonters, despite being geared toward educators.

This program, the Vermont Financial Literacy Virtual Academy is available from October 1, 2025 to January 31, 2026. We also completed a film, “Will Vermont Students be Left Behind?,” that anyone can access. The film reviews the state of personal finance education in Vermont today and we hope it can change minds and spur regulatory action to make sure no student is left behind.