The Percentage of Students Receiving Personal Finance Education
When you graduated from high school, did you know how to create a budget? Did you have an understanding of what stocks and bonds were? Did you know how to do your own taxes?
For many Americans, the answer to these questions is probably a “no”. Only 22.7% of U.S. high school students are guaranteed to receive a personal finance education. While this is up from 16.4% in 2018, this still represents a small fraction of students.
This graphic uses data from Next Gen Personal Finance (NGPF) to show the percentage of high school students required to take a personal finance course by state.
A Closer Look at State-level Personal Finance Education
A standalone personal finance course was defined as a course that was at least one semester, which is equivalent to 60 consecutive instructional hours. Here’s the percentage of students in each state who have a required (not optional) personal finance course.
| State/Territory | % of Students Required to Take Personal Finance Course |
|---|---|
| Mississippi | 100.0% |
| Missouri | 100.0% |
| Virginia | 100.0% |
| Tennessee | 99.7% |
| Alabama | 99.6% |
| Utah | 99.6% |
| Iowa | 91.3% |
| North Carolina | 89.2% |
| Oklahoma | 47.1% |
| New Jersey | 43.0% |
| Nebraska | 42.8% |
| Kansas | 40.8% |
| Wyoming | 38.3% |
| Arkansas | 34.6% |
| Wisconsin | 33.5% |
| South Dakota | 27.1% |
| Ohio | 23.5% |
| Pennsylvania | 16.2% |