“Invest in What’s Next: Life After High School” Builds Strong Personal Financial Management Skills.
“Invest in What’s Next: Life After High School” is an online mini-course that teaches personal financial management and encourages making better financial decisions. This program was developed by the Federal Reserve Banks of Richmond and San Francisco to help students navigate their first major financial decision: what path to pursue after high school. The course encourages students to explore multiple post-secondary education paths and job options and to think about how investing in their knowledge and skills may contribute to their future well-being.
“Invest in What’s Next: Life After High School” Builds Strong Personal Financial Management Skills.
“Invest in What’s Next: Life After High School” is an online mini-course that teaches personal financial management and encourages making better financial decisions. This program was developed by the Federal Reserve Banks of Richmond and San Francisco to help students navigate their first major financial decision: what path to pursue after high school. The course encourages students to explore multiple post-secondary education paths and job options and to think about how investing in their knowledge and skills may contribute to their future well-being.
Reliable Tools for Informed Decision-Making.
The course’s primary objective is to provide reliable economics-based information and tools to help middle and high school students make informed decisions about post-secondary education. The course helps students begin planning their post-high school strategy by exploring and evaluating the costs and benefits of various education paths, while taking into account their job interests and desired lifestyle. Along the way, students develop personal finance and numeracy skills to help implement their strategy in the real world.
An Interactive Structure Keeps Students Engaged.
The course consists of three lessons, each requiring approximately 45 to 60 minutes of sit-down time, plus optional homework assignments. A dashboard directs and charts student progress in the course, allowing teachers and facilitators to tailor their own level of involvement. The lessons present content in a highly interactive format, featuring data-driven treatments. These interactive treatments combine at the end of the course to build a personal financial management plan that students can reference and update for life after high school.
Free, Online Course Helps Students Plan for Their Future.
By providing training and working primarily with middle and high school career and technical education teachers and guidance counselors, YES partners with the Richmond Federal Reserve Bank to promote their program, Invest in What’s Next: Life After High School. This valuable personal financial management planning tool is a free, online course that helps students evaluate their choices for one of the biggest decisions they’ll face — what path to pursue after high school.
Through interactive lessons, students:
- Explore their interests and related jobs;
- Consider different education paths; and
- Create a budget for their education and their future.
The course helps students create a customized personal financial management plan for their future. Student plans can be saved, downloaded and shared in a variety of formats.
YES promotes this program primarily to Career and Technical Education professionals and guidance counselors in middle and high schools. Students are then able to evaluate the ramifications of various choices regarding careers they might pursue, educational institutions they might attend, and lifestyle choices. Through the simulation, they can see how each decision affects their personal financial management plan. If they don’t like what they discover, they can go back and make different decisions to determine how those will affect their personal financial management plan.
