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In Rochester and across the country, predatory financial practices such as payday loans, rent-to-own agreements, and high-cost installment plans continue to target people who lack financial literacy. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau warns that a typical two-week payday loan carries a $15 fee per $100 borrowed, translating to an annual percentage rate approaching 400 percent. Rent-to-own contracts, meanwhile, can leave families paying several times the retail price for basic household goods, as the Beacon has previously documented.
People fall into these traps regularly, often within the financially formative and potentially vulnerable years of young adulthood. The good news is that these schemes can be identified and avoided with some understanding of basic personal finance skills. The bad news is that the New York State Board of Regents recently missed an opportunity to ensure young people across the state are better equipped to do so.
After years of deliberation, the Board of Regents approved a long overdue requirement that students receive exposure to personal finance education in public schools beginning next school year. But the mandate allows schools to comply by simply integrating financial literacy topics within other existing coursework.
The requirement has been widely praised as a step in the right direction. Even so, some supporters, including state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, have pointed out that this mandate alone does not go far enough, favoring the addition of a required standalone personal finance course.
DiNapoli has it right. The dedicated instruction, support, feedback, and accountability that come with a standalone course are the only way to ensure all students across the state leave our public schools with the essential personal financial skills required to thrive and prosper as adults.
Many other states have implemented dedicated personal finance courses, and evidence points to significant improvements in student outcomes. An op-ed by DiNapoli and state Commissioner of Education Betty Rosa points to a study of standalone financial literacy course outcomes in Utah that found higher financial knowledge, improved credit behavior, and stronger debt management among graduates. Similar results have emerged in Georgia, Idaho, and Texas. Research from the Center for Financial Literacy at Champlain College shows that the benefits of a structured personal finance course are detectable a decade after students leave high school.
Standalone courses work because they give students the time and structure to build practical skills, where short or incidental lessons often do not stick. Research from the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research shows that fragmented exposure produces low retention, even among adults, while coherent sequencing leads to long-term learning. Students need space to learn budgeting, saving, insurance, taxes, credit scores, debt repayment strategies, and the basics of investing. A cohesive standalone course supports that work far more than ancillary embedded coursework can.
New York has a strong precedent for how to structure this. Existing statewide requirements mandate a half-year economics course with defined standards, learning objectives, and classroom time dedicated solely to economics. Personal finance deserves a similar treatment.
Moreover, this should be in addition to economics, not in place of it. The required economics course does have personal finance standards embedded in it, but while these two subjects may be complementary, they are separate domains. Some schools do offer an optional personal finance elective in addition to the economics requirement, but this does not ensure that all students receive dedicated instruction in financial literacy.
The strongest argument for a statewide requirement is equity. Access to personal finance instruction in New York varies enormously by district. Schools serving higher percentages of low-income, Black, or Hispanic students are far less likely to offer any personal finance course. These disparities mirror national gaps in financial knowledge: Surveys from Pew Research find that lower-income and minority households report the lowest confidence in budgeting, saving, and debt management. A statewide mandate ensures that all students, regardless of ZIP code, receive essential preparation.
Public support is overwhelming. A national poll conducted by the National Endowment for Financial Education shows that 88 percent of Americans believe high schools should require a semester- or year-long financial literacy course, and 80 percent wish they had been required to take one themselves. Students echo this demand. In testimony to the Board of Regents, students specifically asked for a mandatory standalone personal finance course.
Some worry about the cost of a new requirement. The evidence suggests those fears are overstated. Several states have implemented financial literacy mandates without significant long-term budget increases. Free, high-quality curricular materials exist. Teacher training can be delivered through inexpensive online modules. The Center for Financial Literacy at Champlain College notes that effective programs often rely on already-available curriculum and low-cost professional development.
This is also a moment of policy consequence. With the Regents claiming progress with its flexible mandate while other states are moving toward full-semester personal finance requirements, New York schools risk falling behind until the policy window reopens on financial literacy education as a priority again. Rochester’s economy depends on workers capable of understanding benefits, credit, and long-term financial decisions—our students can’t afford to wait.
Students in the Rochester area and across the state deserve the same access to financial readiness as students in states that moved to a standalone requirement earlier. Our region has a long history of valuing practical education and supporting our tremendous public-school systems. Personal finance fits squarely within that tradition. It equips students with tools they will need as workers, renters, borrowers, savers, and future retirees.
A standalone personal finance course requirement is the most effective and equitable way to prepare young people for adult responsibilities. All students across New York deserve an education that will empower them to thrive and prosper throughout their lives.
Eric W. Morris is portfolio manager and staff economist at Alesco Advisors.
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Take a closer look at the Jr. Achievement (JA) programs that have been working in schools for decades, starting in grade school through High School. Many of the programs offered have accreditation from NY regents. The more recent JA programs in Rochester, NY include the Titan Challenge and The Paychex Discovery Center.
I have been in the schools in New York for 29 years, ( 60 different schools last year), and started a national financial education program, ( CARE), that was in all 50 states and the District of Columbia by 2008 – featuring Bankruptcy Professionals with their unique knowledge and experiences – having seen every financial mistake you can make and thousands of families lives ruined.
New York needs a one semester mandated course like somewhere between 27 and 30 other states already have. Fortunately, we have some forsighted school districts in the Rochester area that already have this mandate – Webster, East Irondequoit, Spencerport, HFL, and Sodus, just to name a few.
I agree with Eric, Michael and William, and everything that they say, and I have been writing about this for years.
More financial education will be a step in the right direction, but we NEED the one semester mandate.
John C. Ninfo II, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge. Retired.
“The good news is that these schemes can be identified and avoided with some understanding of basic personal finance skills.”
I could not agree more with this statement. There is a simple, upstream way to help young people avoid financial pitfalls rather than spend years digging out of them: mindful spending lessons in childhood, when money habits and beliefs are first taking shape.
Children develop money habits and feelings early—simply by watching adults—long before they acquire financial vocabulary or formal knowledge. That mismatch drives decades of unnecessary stress. Early, age-appropriate lessons in “thinking before buying” help children build habits, confidence, language, and skills together, setting them up to become capable financial decision-makers for life.
In that spirit—and because we clearly share the same goal of a financially literate citizenry—I’d like to add a perspective on sequencing. Standalone personal finance courses are indispensable, but embedded lessons make it possible to begin earlier than high school. By embedded lessons, I mean simple concepts woven into existing subjects or advisory time, rather than deferred to a single later course.
Middle school, for example, is a natural time to build basic habits such as pausing, gathering information, and reflecting on trade-offs before spending. Early wins with these behaviors build confidence and demystify financial language, making students more willing to engage with more sophisticated financial knowledge later, when it becomes relevant.
We don’t start any other subject in the middle: we learn the alphabet before we read, and numbers before we perform mathematical operations. Ideally, personal finance would follow a similar progression, with standalone high-school (and beyond) courses capping students’ personal finance education, rather than initiating it. With that sequencing in mind, I fully support the goals of your article and the urgency of preparing young people to navigate today’s financial landscape.
By all means provide students with the financial skills needed to survive in a far more convoluted and dangerous economic landscape than many of us older types had to deal with That being said, if indeed, “In Rochester and across the country, predatory financial practices such as payday loans, rent-to-own agreements, and high-cost installment plans continue to target people who lack financial literacy” then start by prohibiting those practices.
I’ve been pushing this same narrative and directed course study for at least the last 50 years. The fact that it is not taught in our schools, leaves many an individual struggling to understand basic economic and financial facts about life once that person leaves the confines of their home and sets out into the world.
Like many others, I see predatory lending practices, high credit card bills, monies wasted on this or that all the time. And especially so amongst those just getting out of college or high school and entering the work force – many for the first time in their lives.
There is a seminal, educational need for a course like this and the sooner the better.
I also believe that bringing back a dedicated Civics course, in conjunction with a course focusing on financial terms, limitations, expenditures (that strengthen, rather than weaken ones long-term financial standing), and all manner of financial literacy, will, in the long run, be a net benefit to our students, and will dramatically help them keep the forces of ruination or excessive financial burden at bay.
And especially so in an urban environment like the one we have here in Rochester, where a growing number of our residents, due primarily to financial ignorance and abuse, have found themselves increasingly trapped in a never ending cycle of poverty and missed opportunities. Opportunities they can rarely avail themselves of due to excessive debt and poor monetary management.
I would call on the RCSD to begin to implement these new class standards as quickly and satisfactorily as possible. Our city, going forward, very much depends on finding solutions to a money-management problem among our young, prior to graduating or starting life.