Money Matters

Last week I wrote about life skills and work. What interests me about this topic is to debate the claim that the world is divided between something real (work, family, etc) and something less so (often school is a good contrasting example). I have written many times about this as a false divide because many of the workaday skills to succeed in school overlap with the so-called “real world.”

My reflections generated thoughtful responses as well as some very helpful pushback. Happily, there were practically no reactions that described the real world, but one very important topic came up a few times in what I’m calling the pushback. And that is the issue of money and by extension money management.

Money management I’ll get to in a minute, but first I find it important to affirm that college students and young people in general are, on the one hand, an increasingly diverse group, but, on the other hand, often perceived to be privileged which, the data shows, in increasingly not the case. All this is to say that many, many students and their families have an intimate experience with the challenges posed by money management to the extent that they are beyond thinking about budgeting and often thinking about complex trade-offs for limited resources.

It is thus extremely on point to note that jobs teach about money in a way that school sports or other encompassing activities may not. And, interestingly, so far as I know, managing money and talking about it is still considered a private topic, if not something taboo. Some secondary schools are stronger than others in talking about money management and household budgets. It’s an easy topic to ignore but ignoring it doesn’t make it any less formative.