Advocacy

• Liz Frazier pens a compelling piece for Forbes magazine listing five reasons personal finance should be taught in schools. She is preaching to the choir here, but perhaps her approach will get through to the general public, and one might find this a concise source of supporting arguments and statistics for your personal quest.
• Carrie Schwab-Pomerantz explains her efforts as President of the Charles Schwab Foundation to promote financial literacy (Yahoo Finance)
• An academic study out of Illinois shows strong evidence that financial education does work.

Investing

• The Wall Street Journal (subscription) casts a critical eye on target date funds, the mainstay of many 401(k) plans.
• One might think investors might turn to bitcoin given low interest rates on corporate and Treasury bonds and fear of a turn in the stock market, but that is not the case. (Bloomberg)

Paying for College

• NPR interviews author Caitlin Zaloom about her new book, Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost.
• The New Yorker also looks at the impact of debt on the family. New Yorker articles tend to be long, but you can click on the link at the top of this one if you prefer to listen to it as you run your errands or walk the dog this weekend.
• Inceptia has released its annual guide for 2019 to the college and financial aid application process for parents. This is a free resource you can share with your students and their parents.
• This CNBC piece might be somewhat entertaining (or shocking) as they look at the historical cost of college. That statistics might spark some interesting conversations.

Careers/Employment

Many great articles popped up this week just after we posted “What’s New With Careers.” These articles will be tacked on to the bottom of that post.

• Axios describes the down sides to the historically low unemployment rate…”worker deserts.”

Across the country, there are more than 1 million more jobs available than there are people to fill them.

• Another demographic phenomenon impacting the number of women in the workforce is that caring for older family members most often falls to women. (NYT)
• The Economist looks at all the reasons people are staying on the job/in the workforce past the typical retirement age. They may need the money, but they may need the sense of self-worth even more.
• A Gallup poll of millennials supports our anecdotal evidence: they are the job-hopping generation. The current tight job market both enables this and makes it that much more costly to employers.

The data support this. A recent Gallup report on the millennial generation reveals that 21% of millennials say they've changed jobs within the past year, which is more than three times the number of non-millennials who report the same. Gallup estimates that millennial turnover costs the U.S. economy $30.5 billion annually.

• CNN takes a look at how we might better prepare our younger children for the job market they will face as adults.

A report by the World Economic Forum notes that 65% of the children entering primary school in 2017 will have jobs that do not yet exist and for which their education will fail to prepare them.

Financial pitfalls/data privacy

• Student data, specifically held by educational institutions, are the new target for hackers, according to CNBC.
• Credit cards collect and distribute an alarming breadth of data about your personal life. The Washington Post aptly titled this article, “The Spy In Your Wallet.”

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