Inhalt
The United States has experienced an expansion of high school personal finance course mandates over the past two decades (CEE, 2016). Those mandates raise challenges for local school entities as they seek to offer students a personal finance education with scarce resources. Even in states without course mandates, many local school entities require personal finance courses for graduation or, at the very least, offer personal finance electives for their high school students. In the implementation of these efforts, whether required or voluntary, the question arises as to when in a high school student’s secondary education is optimal for the student to take a capstone personal finance course. In this survey paper, we use pre- and posttest data from the Keys to Financial Success program to show that while younger students begin their Keys courses with a relatively lower level of personal finance knowledge than their older high school peers, by the end of the course those two groups of students exhibit, on average, the same personal finance knowledge. This result supports the offering of a personal finance capstone course at any time in the students’ high school schedule with no measurable effect on their end-of-course personal finance knowledge.