A Financial Management Course Should Be Required Curriculum At All Colleges And Universities

If your argument doesn't "involve the use of a gun," then it cannot by definition create a "required curriculum for ALL colleges and universities," which means the topic itself was worded wrong. When you state "Basic economic principles state that when an economy is suffering, members of the population are going to save instead of spend, whether it is through government bonds, long term investments, or interest from savings accounts," you go out of the context of those principles. During an economic contraction it might indeed have such an effect, but our debt has not yet lead to a contraction, it just pours right into people's pockets and gets spent, thus creating the opposite effect of that you describe. By the way, I would disagree that offering the government a bond as your method of savings is a good practice, especially considering the amount of debt it already has. One of these days, by the very nature of debt, if this trend continues, all government bonds will collapse at once. And the more money is put into such bonds, the quicker it comes. What percentage of college students would I estimate CAN balance a checkbook? I'd say 95%. Most of those DON'T, but that is because they don't want to, not because they can't. All you need these days to be able to is Google and math skills (plus a checking account, I happen to lack one of those however :D). I'm sure the percentage that knows the interest on their credit cards is rather low (people are lazy) though they could easily educate themselves on the matter. People with savings accounts probably pay more attention to the interest rates, since they are making and not spending. We might not be able to "prove" empirically whether the state will save money this way without trying it, but to apply that reasoning consistently one would have to test every plan that everyone ever came up with, many of which are harmful and contradictory. Act on what's likely. Besides, economics can't really create "controlled experiments" anyway, the world is too complicated. What "benefits" do you mean the private colleges would see in order to adopt it? So far your arguments involve the state supposedly saving money and the students accruing less debt. Colleges kind of rely on students being in debt, and private ones don't care much about what impact their own institution can have on government debt. Would I like to see a financial management course at colleges and universities? Though I don't support barring them from creating a course, I don't think such a course in total as such is necessarily the best use of a student's time, there is only so much content to cover that would be universally applicable. A freshman economics course offered to those seeking degrees in non-economic intensive fields , however, that included a unit on financial management, would be a good idea. If a college wants to make such a course part of its core requirements, however, it should obviously waive it for those majoring or minoring in business, marketing, economics, etc, and perhaps provide a test whereby students who have independently gained the education the course seeks to provide can demonstrate that knowledge and thus also waive it. Every time I've wanted more knowledge about a given subject, I've looked for it in a book or online :D. And I played the Stock Market Game years ago and made an 11% return on investment in three months (long term average stock returns are traditionally estimated to be 7%), during the months September 11th happened and drove the stock market down no less, so I'm quite aware that there are other ways to invest money :D