A cash course

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This article was published 13/05/2017 (3038 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Usually, it’s the parents who impart their knowledge about money to their children. But with the Fulham family in southwestern Manitoba, the tables were turned recently.

Grade 12 student Kiara Fulham was watching The Big Short, about the United States housing meltdown, with her mom and dad. She soon found herself explaining the film’s subject matter to her parents.

That was not a problem for the 17-year-old Birtle Collegiate student, because she has a pretty firm grasp of the history of the crash after taking business and personal finance courses at the public school since Grade 9.

“They (my parents) didn’t know what was going on or what was being talked about,” she said, “so I was able to break it down for them.”

Fulham is among a select few Manitoba students who have received this kind of in-depth financial education at public schools in the province.

But that is soon about to change as Manitoba is poised to add a comprehensive program of financial education to the curriculum starting next year.

It’s about time, says Fulham’s teacher, Kyle Prevost.

“There’s a huge hunger from parents and students,” says Prevost, 29, who has taught business and personal finance education at the school for a few years already.

He’s a nationally renowned personal finance blogger, who writes about low-cost investing and money management for millennials at youngandthrifty.ca, and he has been at the forefront of the push to make the subject matter standard in Manitoba schools.

“Anecdotally, those of us who have taught personal finance as a school-initiated credit (approved by individual school divisions) have got phenomenal feedback from parents.”

But getting personal finance learning formally integrated into the overall provincial curriculum has been a hard-fought, long battle.

“At the administrative level there has not been much of a hunger for it,” he says.

“That’s because with education, we’re always scrambling to get all the necessary credits squeezed in.”

In other words it’s a tug-of-war of priorities and poor old personal finance often gets left behind.

Yet young adults leaving high school could use all the money knowledge they can get. A 2015 report by accounting firm PWC found less than a quarter of millennials (those aged 18 to 34) demonstrate basic financial literacy.

This speaks to a learning gap in the education system, Prevost says.

But fortunately, “as of next year, it will be a provincial standard course.”

Personal finance will be just one piece of a new stream of curricula: everything from entrepreneurship to marketing to economics and accounting.

The new format will be rolled out as a pilot in the fall, and it should available across the province in the years to follow, says Prevost, who helped develop course material.

In the meantime, Prevost has had a hand in the launch of Manitoba’s first ever high school competition for entrepreneurship and personal finance — in large part aimed at raising interest in and highlighting the value of personal finance education.

The Manitoba High School Case Competition will take place Thursday and Friday in Brandon and is inspired by a similar competition that has run for a few years already in Saskatchewan.

In fact, Prevost and his students attended that event last year and won first place in the personal finance case study competition.

“The hope is that something like that here will make parents, teachers and administrators start thinking about the importance of this kind of learning,” he says, adding his students also attended the Saskatchewan event this year, placing fourth.

He expects the première of the Manitoba competition will be a smaller than its Saskatchewan counterpart. About 60 students from Manitoba, including a team from West Kildonan Collegiate in Winnipeg, will participate with another dozen from Saskatchewan.

Sponsored by Sunrise Credit Union, the event may be off to a modest start, but Prevost expects it will catch on quickly because students are keen to learn about money and business.

Educators and parents now have a heightened awareness of the importance of teaching future generations to manage money responsibly — in part because of their own personal financial challenges often stemming from a lack of knowledge on the subject, Prevost says.

And who can blame them?

Until now, the education system largely has paid lip service to personal finance, he says. Administrators often have argued it could be integrated into other courses like math. (It’s also been offered on a school-by-school basis through a module-based program called The City, first developed in British Columbia.)

“This kind of learning has been woven in throughout the curriculum — at least that’s what has been the dominant narrative — but it’s really not effective because many teachers just don’t have expertise to do it comprehensively,” Prevost says.

“I’ve always made the argument teachers are actually not the best people to be teaching personal finance because our financial situations are so different from that of the average Canadian in terms of job security and the guarantee of a middle-class lifestyle.”

Teachers have good pensions, he adds. They have life and disability insurance automatically through their employer. They also have dental and extended medical coverage.

“As a teacher, if you can simply pay down your mortgage and stay out of credit card debt, you’re going to be way above the Canadian average in retirement,” he says.

In contrast, only 20 to 30 per cent of their students will go on to work in jobs with good pension plans, Prevost says.

So the sooner they can get a head start with a solid foundation in the basics of finance the better they will be long-term.

“Some math teachers will argue why we need (personal finance education) it when it’s already taught in their class.” And indeed students do learn about important concepts like compound interest.

“But I always respond to (teachers and administrators) by asking them to tell me the difference between an RRSP and a TFSA.”

So far, none has been able to answer the question correctly.

One individual who can is Fulham, along with the dozens other students who have taken personal finance courses with Prevost.

“Being able to know how to save for retirement either in an RRSP or in a TFSA is really helpful in my opinion,” she says.

“But I probably found budgeting — how to manage my money — the most helpful so far.”

To that end Fulham says personal finance education has been one of the most meaningful courses she has ever taken at school.

“You’re going to be handling money wherever you are and in whatever you’re doing,” she says.

“Even my parents wish they had taken it when they were in school.”