Personal finance is required in most states. Investing usually isn't taught.

Only 13% of teens currently invest money, and 68% agree that saving for retirement is "something they can think about later in life," according to Junior Achievement's 2025 national survey of U.S. teens.[1] Additionally, 36% say they already set money aside for their future and 23% save for their education, so healthy saving habits for teens are easier to get across. Investing is the one piece of the picture that hasn't landed yet.

A February 2026 Wall Street Journal article, "The New Ways High Schools Are Teaching Teens About Money," reported that just 47% of U.S. high schools with a personal-finance course actually teach investing, citing a University of Alabama analysis of more than 10,000 school course catalogs for the 2024-25 academic year.[2] A state mandate gets a student into a financial education class. The varying mandates can't control what happens once a class starts, and on the one subject that compounds the most over a lifetime, more than half of these classrooms never get to it at all.

The reason for the gap isn't a curriculum-design choice. It's confidence. Christian Sherrill, director of teacher success at Next Gen Personal Finance, says high-school educators feel least comfortable teaching investing "because they don't feel confident in their own investing."[2] Teachers are frequently assigned to personal-finance rather than trained intently for it, and investing is one topic on the syllabus where a teacher's own proficiency gaps show up fastest: budgeting and credit usually have more clear right answers a lesson plan can walk through, while investing requires explaining risk tolerance, time horizon and compounding returns well enough to avoid a student's follow-up question.

The clearest evidence that a great method exists to resolve this subject confidence issue comes from the same article. At Ethel Walker School in Connecticut, every student manages a real $1,000 slice of the school's endowment during a personal-finance class, tracking an actual stock, bond or investment fund through graduation. The teacher running it says the real-money stakes push students toward more research and more caution than a simulation would.[2] The pattern across the schools profiled in this article is that investing gets taught well when a teacher builds a structure that makes the abstraction concrete: real money, a real deadline, a real reason to check a price. That's a materials, design, and engagement solution, which contradicts any belief that teenagers can't handle the subject.

That's the gap FinBizify is built to help close. Personal finance and business education can't depend on individual teachers happening to have the confidence and the materials to make investing feel real, because many don't have the right combination of resources, through no fault of their own. The learning content has to arrive already built that way: grounded in real companies, numbers, and examples a student can check, not a textbook abstraction asking a teacher to supply the concrete example on the fly. A series of mandates is getting investing onto more class schedules now and in the future. Making content lessons and outcomes land requires something beyond what a law requires.

Sources

1. "More Teens are Participating in Financial Literacy Courses, but Gaps in Learning Evident, According to New Survey," Junior Achievement USA, April 4, 2025. Survey conducted by Wakefield Research among 1,000 nationally representative U.S. teens ages 13-18, February 3-10, 2025. https://jausa.ja.org/news/press-releases/more-teens-are-participating-in-financial-literacy-courses-but-gaps-in-learning-evident-according-to-new-survey

2. Joann S. Lublin, "The New Ways High Schools Are Teaching Teens About Money," The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 8, 2026. https://www.wsj.com/personal-finance/high-school-financial-education-4396b221