Does Financial Education in High School Affect Retirement Savings in Adulthood?

Financial education affects financial knowledge and downstream behaviors

“…show that financial education reduces non-student debt (Brown et (Harvey 2020). This recent literature as well confirms the findings in the meta-analysis.…”

High school financial education courses in the United States.: What is the importance of setting state policies?

“…An additional literature considers quasi-experimental variation in graduation requirements by state and year. This research finds overwhelmingly positive effects of financial education on financial outcomes, including credit scores, delinquencies, payday borrowing, methods of financing postsecondary education, and student loan repayment (Brown et al, 2016;Harvey, 2020;Mangrum, 2022;Urban et al, 2020;Stoddard and Urban, 2020).…”

“…While that is the effect of the policy (the ITT estimate), the education is likely to be 2.5 times more effective (the TOT estimate) once we account for the lack of implementation in some schoolsan effect size of 8.25 percentage points. Further, Harvey (2020) finds that requiring personal finance education in high school reduces the use of payday loans by 3.9 percentage points (the ITT estimate). Scaling the ITT estimate up to account for the lack of universal take-up suggests that education could have reduced payday lending by 9.75 percentage points (the TOT effect).…”

Financial teaching by parents and financial education at school or workplace

“…They suggested a possible endogeneity explanation-those states had imposed mandates during rapid economic growth periods, which might have explained the higher savings behavior of concurrent graduates. However, more recent studies did find that financial education mandates reduced defaults and higher credit scores among young adults (Urban et al, 2020), reduced the likelihood and frequency of payday borrowing among young adults (Harvey, 2019a), and increased bank account ownership among young adults with lower educational credentials, while, overall, having no effect no bank account ownership and propensity to save (Harvey, 2019b). Burke et al (2020) also reported that state-mandated financial education improves financial well-being, primarily accruing to men and those with college degrees.…”