The STEM field is a broad one, and it includes many of the most vital, well-researched, and well-funded disciplines in the world. And yet, accounting and finance were never officially recognized as components of the STEM curriculum.
Not until recently, that is.
Just last year, Congress signed a law that federally recognized accounting as an essential part of STEM curricula all across the country. It is now a skill set that will be taught to all children attending public school –– and there are several reasons why you should be interested in this development.
America Has A Financial Literacy Problem, And We’re Finally Trying To Fix It
It’s no secret that young Americans are woefully unprepared for financial adulthood. School doesn’t prepare us for it, our parents are often uncertain about how to explain financial skills to us, and we end up winging it by the time we enter the so-called “real world” where these skills are so vital.
By recognizing accounting as an essential part of middle and high school education, we give young Americans the opportunity to avoid this kind of confusion and stress once they finish their schooling.
According to the Financial Educators Council, “A lack of understanding of […] the basics of personal finance leads to a perpetual cycle of poor financial decisions that restrict the social mobility of Americans.” This isn’t a blame game. It’s simply the reality of our nation’s social situation. People can’t make good decisions when they aren’t given the tools or knowledge that enables them to do so.
Accounting decisions in particular come with a very steep learning curve.
The reason for this is simple: we are at our most financially vulnerable when we’re young and freshly graduated (whether from higher education, i.e. universities, or from our K-12 experience). At the same time, the financial decisions we make at this point in our lives are those most likely to have lasting and often self-perpetuating consequences down the road.
This catch-22 is a big part of why so many Americans are deep in debt and seemingly unable to ever get out of it. The cycle usually starts early — you rack up debt during or after schooling, current wages and cost-of-living disparities add to your burdens rather than helping them, you aren’t taught to manage or plan for your financial reality…and the whole thing ends up becoming a runaway train of interest payments, concurrent loans (sometimes used to pay off OTHER debts), and general despair.
Our situation is tragic, and it’s also preventable. Adding accounting to our STEM curriculum means that millions of young people will now have the knowledge and access to resources that can help them to either prevent this cycle entirely or stop it early if it starts to occur.
And that’s only one element of a move that could change the way we view finance as a whole. Whether it’s tax education or basic budgeting skills, this is a law that will pay back dividends for decades to come.
The Accounting Industry Is Facing Unprecedented Labor Shortages, And That Equals A Win-Win Opportunity For Us All
Generally speaking, labor shortages aren’t a good thing.
In a country with a long history of overcoming them, they do, however, represent an opportunity. And we can turn that opportunity into a net good so long as we have the will.
Accounting is a high-turnover, highly-skilled profession that’s been facing a skilled labor shortage for years. When other parts of the STEM field faced similar challenges, changes to the k-12 curriculum provided a labor pipeline that we’re only now beginning to appreciate. Providing early STEM education and resources has allowed kids with an interest in the medical, engineering, IT, and other fields to plan for and access a professional future that includes them. It has led to a marked increase in available labor for all of the industries related to these fields.
Until now, accounting wasn’t given a seat at that curricular table.
If students showed an aptitude for finance or took interest in the subject, they had few outlets for that interest. Is it any wonder, then, that so few of them ended up pursuing a career in the accounting industry later on? Many people are content to blame the topic itself for this lack of professional interest. This is — to put it bluntly —a perspective that is both dismissive and inaccurate.
You may be shocked to learn that yes, many accountants genuinely enjoy their work and find it extremely rewarding.
Plenty of people have a genuine passion for finance, and they hone their skills not because it’s practical, but because they derive purpose and happiness from doing so.
Just as some kids demonstrate an early interest in engineering, architecture, or art, others show a natural inclination toward money and all things related to it. And while we can encourage this interest at home or through the media, we need to teach it if we want to see a professional impact.
This ruling is a major step in building a framework that not only rewards kids with financial aptitude during their schooling but also provides them with a path for pursuing it once that schooling is done. They win a future that suits them and a profession that rewards their skills; companies win better, more invested employees and, most likely, a much lower turnover rate.
The rest of us get better accountants.
So, we end up with a win-win-win scenario that’s fairly simple to achieve. Sounds like common sense, right? It’s an educational framework we should all be thrilled to develop and happy to encourage.
We’ve Been Living With A Short-Term Mindset For Too Long, And This Will Help Us To Do Better
Financial decisions are inherently long-term decisions. Skills like budgeting, accounting, tax planning, and debt management all require a long-term mindset and a lot of discipline.
That kind of long-term thinking doesn’t come naturally to most of us.
Instead of complaining about our own ingrained, often biologically-programmed tendencies toward short-term gains and immediate rewards, we might want to consider a more productive course of action. What doesn’t come naturally can still be learned. What can be learned must first be taught.
Do you see where we’re going with this?
The most important skills we learn in school aren’t the ones that relate to specific facts or theorems. It’s the “soft” skills — skills like discipline, planning, and self-management — that really impact our lives later on.
Accounting and finance are the two fields that best demonstrate this truth in action. Financial literacy doesn’t just mean you can balance your checkbook or lay out a household budget: it also means you can be disciplined and aware enough to see the necessity of doing these things, identify the rewards for their completion, and take action to accomplish them.
Gaining financial literacy is like removing a pair of broken glasses you didn’t even realize you were wearing. It clarifies so many things we encounter in adult life, and it grants the kind of freedom our entire nation was founded on. Being financially literate means you avoid problems and spot opportunities — it is both a tailwind that propels you forward and a current that washes away obstacles before they can stop your progress.
Once something is taught to you over and over again, it becomes a part of your natural, everyday behaviors. By teaching accounting throughout grade school, we demystify and make routine an area of life that a lot of young people find truly terrifying.
By adding accounting and finance to our schooling, we give ourselves the perspective and skills it takes to see these subjects as they really are: simple and routine necessities that anyone can learn to understand.
We’re also imparting the kind of long-term skills that are so vital to our collective life…and which seem to be in increasingly short supply as we continue to speed up the pace of living. In short, our short-term lifestyles make it easier and easier to avoid the less exciting realities of the long-term — which means we need a major intervention before that reality catches up to all of us (any more than it already has).
This curricular decision is that intervention.
Conclusion: The Economy Doesn’t Run Itself, And Our Education Determines What Tomorrow Will Look Like
Many metaphors have been used to describe the relationship between individuals and the economy as a whole. Most of them are some variation of “cogs in a machine.” Personally, we find this dry, impersonal comparison to be a bit insulting.
When it comes to our economic reality, individuals are more like heartbeats or breaths that fuel a larger, collective organism. One person’s financial success can uplift an entire community. One family’s financial failures can harm hundreds of individual workers and dependents. We’re a social species, after all, and no man or woman is a financial island.
What’s surprising isn’t the fact that the recent Accounting-as-STEM legislation was passed. What’s shocking is the fact that it wasn’t part of our education in the first place.
As a country based on capitalist and arguably progressive principles (not in the modern, politically-oriented sense, mind you), our conceptions of overall success and prosperity have always involved financial success and prosperity as their foundational underpinnings.
As a nation, our collective goals have always included progressively better financial health, progressively more access to resources, and progressively more effective economic policies. This is true no matter which end of the political spectrum you most identify with.
Why, then, was the role of each individual's financial education left out of the equation for so long?
There are a lot of ways you could answer this question, but at the end of the day, it’s more important to consider the decisions we make here and now. In no field or discipline is educational progress more impactful than in the accounting field. We should all sit up and take notice when that progress is fought for, and we all have reasons to celebrate when progress is finally won.
This is one of those times, and including accounting in STEM is a step that will lift us up for many centuries to come.
