How well do high school students understand the basics of personal finance? Unfortunately, not well enough, a new survey reveals.
The survey, sponsored by the non-profit Jump$tart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy and funded by the Merrill Lynch Foundation, asked 6,586 high school seniors in 40 states to answer questions about topics ranging from credit card interest to home mortgages.
The average 12-grader correctly answered 48.3 percent of the questions correctly. That was down from the 2006 survey, when the average senior got more than half – 52.4 percent – of the survey questions right.
