Today’s high school students are inundated with information in classes that they may or may not use when they become adults and are working and raising families.

One thing they’ll have to learn is how to manage their finances. Our parents may have taught us about checking accounts, paying bills, and credit scores, but too many of us learned by trial and error.

With that in mind, Pennsylvania has become the 25th state to require high schools to provide a course in personal financial literacy starting in the 2026-27 school year.

Next Gen Personal Finance is a non-profit organization that has been pushing for all high school students to take a semester of personal finance before graduating and offering lesson plans for teaching financial literacy.

On The Spark Tuesday, Yanely Espinal, Director of Outreach for Next Gen Personal Finance and author of the book Mind Your Money listed a few of the topics that financial literacy will explore,"Earning income, spending money. Saving money. Investing. Understanding credit and managing credit and managing risk. So they sort of put all of the different lessons under one of these big buckets. And that's how students are being taught all the different basic financial lessons about budgeting, banking and how to make a plan around your future goals for money."

Espinal indicated that many high school students are being exposed to finances for the first time,"Taxes, they've never paid taxes before, likely if they're teenagers, insurance, they haven't had to select insurance, whether that's health insurance, car insurance, life insurance, homeowner's insurance, investing a lot of times they just haven't thought about the stock market yet and what opportunities exist for them to build wealth over time. Some of them may have bank accounts, but many of them don't yet have bank accounts, and they haven't yet had to create a budget. What am I going to allocate my money to? And what do I just have to cut out because I just simply don't have enough dollars, right. And many of them have never considered their credit score what it is and why it matters."

Espinal added that "the psychology of money" is an important part of learning about finances because managing finances is different for today's young people,"The behavioral economics in the psychology aspect comes in because so much of money today is internet based. It's digital. And so when we think about the way the internet looks today and how it operates, it's very different from how it was even just ten, 20 years ago. It's as if the internet is so much more invasive in our lives. I mean, companies are constantly just putting a barrage of ads before us, whether that's on social media, whether that's on a web browser. And then what they do is they target us with these ads and then re-target. Even if you just look at an ad for a couple seconds, they know that you hovered over it for a little bit longer than all the other content on that page, and they will re-target you until you make a purchase. And that to me, as a millennial and probably every generation older than us, they we see that as a bit invasive and a little bit too, it's it's too much it's more negative than positive versus these younger generations, Gen Z and younger. This is their normal. They have been experiencing this world of the internet. It is their normal. They don't see it as invasive to be targeted and re-targeted. And so I think we really have to help students understand what they don't know, which is that your personal finances are being influenced constantly by your psychology."

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