Discover believes brighter financial futures begin by providing students with the skills they need to help them succeed long after they leave the classroom. Pathway to Financial Success in Schools is committed to bringing financial education to students nationwide, and we partner with schools, communities, and organizations to fulfill this commitment.
The reality that we face today is that more than 1 in 6 students in the U.S. don’t reach the baseline level of proficiency in financial literacy. Additionally, nearly 1/4th of millennials spend more money than they earn. To help positively impact this issue, we created Pathway to Financial Success in Schools, an immersive financial literacy program designed to empower middle and high school students to take control of their financial futures.
In this program, educators, students, and families can explore a wealth of multi-media, cross-curricular, standards-aligned multimedia resources designed by educational experts to support both the teaching and learning of essential and fundamental financial literacy skills. The program inspires students in-school, after-school and at home using flexible and modular content to make informed financial decisions and achieve their personal goals.
In this program, both middle and high school curriculum is supplemented with additional educator resources, including lesson plans, instructional videos and interactives. All resources are divided into easy-to-navigate thematic units, which can be taught sequentially or in any order that aligns with instructional goals. All materials are correlated to the Council for Economic Education’s (CCE) National Standards in Financial Literacy.
The middle school program uses video to engage both students and teachers. At the student level, six informative student videos introduce key personal finance concepts from the CEE financial literacy standards. . Accompanying educator professional development-style videos help guide instruction with teaching tips and recommended best practices. We created standards-aligned activities for ELA, math, social studies and family & consumer sciences. Each unit offers four activities to help students put important concepts into practice.
The high school program includes interactive resources designed to motivate high school students on their path to financial independence. Twenty four, self-paced elearning modules, enable students to explore a topic through a series of interactive events. Each elearning module is designed to be completed in 15 minutes or less, and each unit offers two classroom activities to help students grow on their journey towards adulthood. Additionally, students and families are encouraged to extend the learning at home with family extensions that help parents and/or caregivers continue vital conversations.
Discover's Pathway to Financial Success program has been making a big impact on financial literacy since 2012. This includes more than $14 million invested in high school financial literacy programs across the country and more than $1 million invested in support of Chicago Public Schools for curriculum, materials and teacher training. The program has reached over 1,350,000 students since launching in 2017.
The program has proven to be especially valuable during the Coronavirus pandemic. We broke all personal records with a 687% month-over-month increase. This resulted in a 634% year-over-year increase from April 2019.
In April 2020, the Pathway to Financial Success in Schools website had over four times the users seen in the previous month. There were also 2.8x as many visitors (a 178% increase) to the website compared to April of last year. Success was also seen through an increase in engagement with self-paced modules, doubling from 3,500 plays of the modules in March 2020 to over 8,000 plays in April 2020.
