MW I went to an Advanced Placement personal-finance class. Here's what I learned.
By Beth Pinsker
Financial literacy will get serious treatment in high schools starting next year as part of the AP's new 'Career Kickstart' bundle
Huntington High School teacher Bryan Outsen (second from left) with students from his Advanced Placement Business With Personal Finance class.
If you had $1,000 that you wanted to save for a special purchase in a few years, would you know the best place to put it to ensure it was safe and had some chance of growth?
After completing a class exercise, the students in Bryan Outsen's test run of the new Advanced Placement Business With Personal Finance course at Huntington High School on Long Island, N.Y., would be able to give you all of your options - and calculate the total interest you'd earn with each one. And as a bonus, they could tell you why banks and the government pay people to let them hold their money.
"So they can use it to give out loans," said one student, a junior.
When asked to choose between savings accounts at a big bank, a credit union and an online institution; certificates of deposit; and a 1-year Treasury bill, the students found a clear winner for the specified four-year savings timeline of the assignment: the Treasury bill.
The lesson on why big banks offer less interest (because they can) and longer-term products typically offer higher rates (because of the yield curve) was for another day.
And because this AP class aims for students to do college-level work, rather than just building life skills, there would definitely be follow-up to show the academic rigor involved in personal finance - subject area that's often ignored, even at the college level.
The beta test class at Huntington, one of about 100 across the U.S., is small this year - during a visit by MarketWatch in March, there were only six students present during the fourth-period class. Next year is the first real iteration of the course, with an exam at the end of the year. It's part of the AP's new "Career Kickstart" bundle that will also include AP Cybersecurity next year and AP Networking the following year. In the same subject area, the AP also offers microeconomics, macroeconomics, statistics and a whole suite of math courses, but this is the first practical application of those at this high-school level.
The rollout comes at a time when financial literacy among teens is finally gaining traction in the U.S. According to the National Endowment for Financial Education, 30 states now require a personal-finance education course, up from seven states in 2020. Even so, most teens are not learning core skills - more than 50% failed a diagnostic test from the National Financial Educators Council, and the average score among 15- to 18-year-olds was just 64%. There's no central tracking of personal-finance courses at the college level, but the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College found just over 100 colleges that offered for-credit courses in the subject, out of a total of roughly 4,000 undergraduate institutions in the U.S.
Outsen expected the new AP course to be well-subscribed, as did the College Board, which is the sponsor of the AP program.
"Business is the major that is most popular in college," said Jennifer Mulhern, vice president of AP Program Access. "We wove it together with personal finance for two reasons: When students learn in integrated ways, their learning is much stronger, and it's much deeper when there's relevance. We wanted them to be able to learn at the micro and macro level."
The savings-rate exercise, for example, is part of a case study students work throughout the year about a small-business owner. In the Huntington class, it's a person who owns a small shop called Cool Beans Cafe. The savings are for expanding to the space next door. The students are going to eventually work on a business plan to take that $1,000, add to it monthly and figure out when the business could grow.
"Students are able to think about real-world applications this way," said Mulhern.
Consider the personal-finance nuts and bolts involved in that kind of situation. You have to understand the banking system, the run rate of the business and the potential of future costs and profits. "You also have to understand the concept of the time value of money," said J. Ian Norris, a professor of marketing and psychology at Berea College in Kentucky, who consulted on the curriculum for the course. "When you put yourself in the shoes of the decision maker, it's not abstract."
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College-level work
AP courses are designed to have the same rigor as a college class and are usually accepted for credit or placement when high-school students get to college. In that sense, AP Business With Personal Finance is not designed to teach students what they need to know to get their first jobs or pay their bills. Rather, it treats these subjects as academic disciplines, similar to, say, AP Psychology or AP Statistics.
The course works through an introduction to business and has units on marketing, personal saving and borrowing, business finance and accounting, business management and personal budgeting and investing.
"Business is the application of economics," said Norris. "Economics tells you the rules of the game, and business is about playing the game. Personal finance is playing the game of life. It's the decisions I have to make for my own financial future."
While business courses abound in college, personal-finance ones do not. Norris said most personal-finance courses he has taught involved behavioral finance and were combined with other disciplines, like psychology or education. But now lessons from personal finance are being integrated into all areas of the Berea curriculum, where most students attend tuition-free and many get financial aid for room and board. Almost every student works while they attend the school, so the lessons start in the first year by getting students comfortable with money, and by senior year they cover evaluating job offers and benefits.
"The benefit of having personal finance in the classroom is that eight out of 10 parents don't feel comfortable about having money conversations with kids," said Melanie Mortimer, president of the Sifma Foundation, a nonprofit organization that promotes financial literacy, including with a simulated stock-market game. "It needs to happen somewhere."
For Aaron McDaniel, a professor of entrepreneurship and innovation at University of California, Berkeley's Haas School of Business, the importance of teaching personal finance to young people is that they need to understand how their personal lives intersect with their professions.
"As a person, you are a business. There's branding associated with it," he said. That goes not only for social-media influencers, but also for anyone doing freelance work or even a regular job as part of a company. Have a spouse? You have a business partner. Have kids? You potentially have employees - or perhaps liabilities.
One of the ways AP Business With Personal Finance addresses this with its project-based approach is for students to build a financial plan for a household. They read scenarios and look at a family's income, debt and variable expenses. "The students act as the financial adviser," said John Cook, a business teacher at Woodville-Tompkins High School in Savannah, Ga. "This opened up some things that I had not thought to teach in a certain way, because it forces the students to advise the family."
The students think about what might affect the family not only now, but down the road, too. They go out 12 months in time and reassess the situation to see if there are any changes. In one scenario, an earner in the family gets the opportunity to get matching retirement funds, and students have to advise how much the family should put toward that so as not to shortchange building up an emergency fund.
This is something most adults could use a course on as well. "It's putting things in a visceral way," said Cook. "It's not something I had seen or thought to do before in class."
-Beth Pinsker
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April 22, 2026 10:22 ET (14:22 GMT)
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