Think You’re Good With Money? Try Scoring Higher Than a Teen on This New Advanced Placement Exam

A new Advanced Placement (AP) course is bringing personal finance into the classroom and making it a standard part of the American high school experience.

According to a recent report from The Wall Street Journal, the College Board will add a new AP offering this fall that combines business education with practical skills on managing money. 

The College Board designed the yearlong AP Business with Personal Finance course as the equivalent of an introductory college-level business class. It teaches students how to make personal finance decisions before they enter college or the workforce.

Students will study entrepreneurship, marketing, finance, accounting and management through case studies and project-based work in the first-of-its-kind AP course. Alongside those subjects, they will learn personal finance fundamentals including budgeting, saving and investing. 

The course is aligned with national personal finance standards created by the Council for Economic Education and the Jump$tart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy.

The goal of the course

As of March, 39 states require personal-finance education for high-school graduation, according to the Council for Economic Education. Of those, 26 require a stand-alone personal finance course, while 13 allow the material to be incorporated into another required subject. That is a sharp increase from 2022, when only 12 states had such requirements.

New graduation mandates in California, Colorado, Delaware and Hawaii alone affect an estimated 2.3 million high-school students, per the Council for Economic Education. Kentucky and Texas have also strengthened prior requirements by moving from embedded financial literacy lessons to dedicated personal finance coursework.

For the College Board, the new AP course intends to serve two goals at once: introduce students to a popular area of college study and give them tools for everyday financial life. The organization says students who complete the course may be eligible for college credit, as is standard with an AP course. 

More students choose business than ever

Business remains the largest undergraduate degree category in the United States. In the 2021–22 academic year, colleges awarded 375,418 bachelor’s degrees in business, representing 18.6% of all bachelor’s degrees conferred, according to figures based on National Center for Education Statistics data.

Jennifer Mulhern, the College Board’s vice president for AP program access, told the Journal that the course intends to better prepare high-schoolers for college business courses while also helping boost their personal finance competency.

The College Board’s curriculum includes a project in which students act as financial advisers for a fictional family, developing recommendations around education, housing, retirement and charitable giving. The assignment turns abstract concepts into decisions that represent the trade-offs households make in real life. 

Bryan Outsen, a teacher at Huntington High School in Huntington, N.Y., said he is introducing the new AP course this year partly because of its focus on practical financial management and career-ready skills.

“Too many of our students have zero concept of the dollar and exactly what it takes to budget, save and support a household,” Outsen told the Journal.