A s college tuition continues to rise, the lack of financial literacy of the average Millennial will become an ever-increasing problem.
Therefore, the University should create a course on personal finance that would count as a general education requirement credit.
While the state does hold some financial education events and includes it in course curriculum for high shcools, it still only received a B in financial literacy education from the Center for Financial Literacy .
UNC cannot wait for the state to improve.
This generation is the largest the U.S. has seen . A recent study showed only 80 percent could answer four out of five questions on a simple financial literacy quiz and the same proportion has one source of long-term debt.
It could be devastating if 80 million Millenials enter the economy with debt and no knowledge of how to control it.
A class must be created to instill students with financial knowledge. Even more so, it should come with the enticing reward of satisfying some general education requirements.
As it would most likely be housed by the Economics Department, it should be built to partially replace one of the most enrolled in classes, Economics 101. By allowing the class to satisfy the same gen eds it could help to draw students away from a course that already experiences high enrollment.
Student groups have begun to push financial literacy by themselves. The Association of Student Governments has allocate $1000 to each UNC-System campus for this purpose and The Campus Smart Initiative will soon begin a series on personal finance . However, these are merely band-aids to a larger problem.
