STAMFORD—Matthew Buchkowski knows tuition won’t be his only expense when he goes to college in a few months.
College students usually also have to pay for university fees, room and board, transportation, books, supplies, food, cellphone bills and numerous other personal expenses, including haircuts, laundry—the list goes on.
With that in mind, learning how to use his money and potential loans is crucial, the Trinity Catholic High School senior said.
“It’s definitely something I want to know how to manage,” he said. “Money is overall very complex. It’s something that I want to get a good grasp on.”
Buchkowski joined a recent workshop on college loans held at Trinity as part of Financial Literacy Month.
The series, a Patriot Bank initiative, comes weeks after the company released an alarming report showing that nearly half of Americans lack basic financial literacy.
The news is even worse for Connecticut, where high schools don’t require personal finance classes. The report gives the state an “F” in providing financial literacy education.
“Personally, I feel like this course should be an elective that kids can actually take it in school,” Buchkowski said. “But any class is better than none.”
The goal of the four-part series, which also tackled budgeting and credit, is for high school students to learn how to better manage their money and prevent them from falling into the college loan trap.
“We’re raising scholars, the next generation, but we’re not giving them the tools within the school system to balance check books, to learn how to make deposits, to save for a rainy day, to do big investments,” said Judith Corprew, an executive vice president at Patriot Bank and one of the bankers who taught the series at Trinity.
An 18-country assessment by the Organization for Economic Cooperations shows that nearly 20 percent of American teenagers are not proficient in financial literacy. The issue has gained more attention as government-owned student loans top $1 trillion.
Thomas Butler, a Trinity parent who helped connect the school with Patriot’s financial literacy program, said more needs to be done to reduce students’ financial burden when they’re in college.
“When kids in school these days are not being taught about the basic metrics of the value of a dime, the value of an hour of labor and if you want to buy that nice new car or pay for college, they will look at you and say, ‘Oh so what? I’ll come out of college with a $50,000 in debt. It’s no big deal,’” Butler said.
“They don’t know what it’s going to cost to pay that back,” he said. “That’s why this program is so critical.”
Principal David Williams hopes the workshop series is just the first of many efforts to educate Trinity students on financial literacy, which he described as “an invaluable life skill.”
“It’s a burden when you come out of college and have to manage your loans,” he said.
But Buchkowski seems to have a pretty good plan to avoid getting into debt. The 17-year-old, who has dual citizenship in the U.S. and Canada, is going to Carleton University in Ottawa, where he said tuition is much lower.
“I still may need loans,” he said, “but I won’t have to spend as much time paying them back.”
noliveira@stamfordadvocate.com, 203.964.2265, @olivnelson