As a high school teacher, Richard Clark knows it can be difficult to explain to students why certain subjects are relevant to them. But he hasn’t had that problem with his new personal finance course. ”The students love it. It’s selling itself at this point,” said Clark, a business teacher at Pilgrim High School in Warwick. “It’s been an unqualified success.”
Clark actually teaches two courses: Personal Finance I, and Personal Finance II. The first introduces students to the theories and concepts of investing, saving, and using credit – an especially important subject, given that students barely 18 years old are being courted by credit card companies, Clark said.
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The second course gets students on the path to building wealth. Though they do not actually invest, they do create a mock portfolio. The course is taught in the computer lab, and students learn to research and compare mutual funds using the various free Internet financial Web sites, such as Yahoo! stock quotes, www.stockquotes.com, and Barron’s Online.
Clark, who left the business world to become a teacher five years ago, said he started the course in 1998 because of his own personal interest in the topic, and because he suspected that students were not learning enough about these topics in their other courses.
”It’s a real life issue,” he said. “High school kids are starting to think in terms of, ‘How am I going to finance that first car, finance my college education?’ I think there is a real relevance there.”
Some of the students who take Personal Finance I tell him that they wished they had known of the class sooner. The course is an elective, filled mostly with juniors and seniors. Some students, who were unable to fit Personal Finance I into their schedules as juniors, will opt to jump right into Personal Finance II as seniors, he said. Indeed, the last topic covered in the first course is investing, to whet their appetite for the next course.
National statistics back up Clark’s notion that personal finance education is not widely available. According to a 1999 study by the American Savings Education Council, two-thirds of U.S. high school and college students say they need to know more about money management. The survey found that just 21 percent of high school and college students have taken a course on personal finance in school. The survey notes, however, that 62 percent of the students surveyed said their current school offered a personal finance course. But of the students who said a class was available to them, only 34 percent opted to take it, the survey said.
Don Blandin, a spokesman for the council, noted that youths often turn to their parents and to their friends for information about money matters. Therefore, the council will follow last year’s survey with a survey of parents to see how much they know about personal finance, Blandin said.
Clark noted that teachers sometimes sit in on his Personal Finance II class just to listen in. When they do, they get a taste of Clark’s investment strategy: Buy and hold. He demonstrates this by playing an Internet stock market game along with his students. While some students prefer to buy and sell constantly, Clark buys a half dozen stocks in September and holds them. With this strategy, he finds that his stocks are consistently among the top three performers in the class over time. Heavy traders, meanwhile, see their fortunes rise and fall swiftly, he said.
”Through that game they’re learning – students do extremely well,” he said. “They’re taking a lot of this stuff home and showing their parents.”
Some students who have just turned 18 are beginning to think about getting into the market for real, Clark added. He encourages them to start with mutual funds before they dive into stocks. But he also encourages students to begin the process of saving and investing early.
”The main message here is that it’s not rocket science to get into this kind of saving and investing,” he said.
One of the difficulties students face is fitting elective courses like this one into their schedule, Clark said. But he added that some form of personal finance education may one day become required. “It definitely should be,” he said.
