Financial Education and Financial Access: Lessons Learned from Child Development Account Research

a conference table trying to understand why, in a period of rapid economic growth, personal bankruptcies continued to escalate. Someone suggested that recent financial deregulation had engendered the proliferation of increasingly complex financial products, making it difficult for consumers to understand exactly what they were buying. This led to the hypothesis that the increase in consumer distress during good economic times probably resulted from consumers’ lack of financial literacy. From this meeting emerged the Jump$tart Coalition, a group of academics, government officials, financial institutions, and NGOs with a shared interest in promoting financial literacy. Since several of us were educators, we naturally felt that the problem of financial illiteracy could be overcome through financial education. The most logical place to begin this type of education would be the high school, where students presumably were old enough to be concerned with this type of problem and also logistically reachable. The consensus was that financial education, focused on older high school students, could solve the national problem of financial illiteracy in 10 years. We decid-