I've been told there's tons of money in education! But the insight is the edtech stuff that makes money does not sell education. B2b up-skilling platforms for example sell the promise of higher earnings. Food safety, HR training sell compliance. College prep sells college acceptance, and so on.
The people with the foresight to pay for financial literacy will very likely already be financially literate.
I'm conflicted.
Btw, there's also money in actual learning things, look at eg music classes adults take just for their own sake.
(Of course, you could say that a guitar teacher is selling 'getting laid'. But that's perhaps going a bit too far.)
This is what they sell, but it's outdated since the 50s and millennials+ have slowly realized it was largely false promises. (both sides are to blame just to be clear)
If that were the only thing, yeah I could see it being a hard sell.. especially as costs have gotten a lot higher than when I went to university at the beginning of the millennium. But add in the peer network and the ease of making friends because of repeated random encounters.. and I think it's still worth it.
The whole "companies expect a degree, at least to show that you can finish a multi-year effort" was always an afterthought for me.
Now the more controversial stance is we can't say this earning power is causal. That's why specifically I said people buy the gateway ticket into these higher earning jobs. It's self-perpetuating.
I can't disagree with the data, what I can say is people that out-earn non-college people is not _because_ of college. The population represented by non-college goes really down really deep for large variety of socio-economic reasons let's just say.
My call out is when we think about changing outcomes for underserved groups of people, there's a hard reckoning that comes.
For example I dabbled in "teaching people to cook". It's one of the most transformative skills. After some months my takeaway is that people that pay for learning to cook aren't paying "to learn", they already know or want to get better or quite bluntly pay for food-porn, edutainment. There's thousands of published cook books of all forms. The barrier isn't lack of materials/content.
A person goes from zero to 1 learning to cook due to necessity, not my online saas course. Btw saas can work, people make a killing; but they're paying for network and "influencer" access, not cooking content.
Some clear requirement like "5th grade math" would be more appropriate.
I am not questioning that one can learn enough to pass the lessons, but often times, lessons fail to prepare for the real world.
I personally consider myself to be quite keen in the areas of financial literacy compared to most people. To be honest, I owe most of what I learned to two things:
1. Being addicted to Runescape in my youth back in the early 2000s. I am dead serious too. For a boring grindy point-and-click adventure, the game really had a lot of real world lessons packed in to it -- predominately to much of the game's economy depending on interactions with other players at the time.
2. Some unpleasant experiences growing up, but I do not feel like those had as much as an impact as #1, oddly enough.
One important point about the game is that I had stake in the game, so to speak. I put a lot of (wasted) time and (wasted) effort into the game in order to earn more and more fake, virtual currency. However, that in-game currency, at the time, had a lot of value to me. Every decision I made with the in-game currency had to be calculated and tact. "How do I earn enough for <x>?" If I spend <y>, I can afford <z>, but won't have enough for <a>" And so on.
I feel like in a lesson on a platform like EconTeen might lack that "stake" or "value" that MMORPG resources or real world money has. I am not trying to say EconTeen is a subpar product or anything like that. I am just thinking about myself, once a teenager, and I know I would have learned just enough to make it through these lessons as fast possible so that I may return to my video game as fast as possible.
Chrisjackson4•2h ago
Most kids don’t get any financial education we’re trying to fix that.
22+ self-paced lessons 25+ real-world tools (budgeting, investing, taxes, careers, etc.)
Our first launch reached 2,500+ students, and we’re now gearing up for back-to-school outreach with teachers and schools.
https://www.producthunt.com/products/econteen?launch=econtee...
https://econteen.com/
I’d love any feedback, harsh or helpful. Thanks!
– Christopher
SoftTalker•1h ago
We got some, in home economics. Not sure that subject is really offered anymore?
That was mostly around budgeting. What we didn't get nearly enough of was time value of money, and the cost of credit/borrowing.
As a result a lot of people buy a car and it's just a payment. They have no idea what they are paying as a total price. They don't start a 401K because they have no concept how much difference compounding makes if you start saving when you are 22 vs. 50. Then they are upset when companies do stuff "to benefit stockholders" and never consider that they could have been a stockholder.
jncfhnb•54m ago
They can’t to any meaningful extent.
Compound interest still sucks when you don’t have a meaningful initial investment.
dsiegel2275•1h ago
harmmonica•1h ago
If that option is there I couldn't find it so consider that a single-user usability test or just user error.
jncfhnb•52m ago
varenc•30m ago
Also pretty ironic that this site is designed to trick you into paying for a subscription you've forgotten about...but that's the entire subscription/free trial economy of course.