Latest / Marci talks money (and life) / Financial Literacy Education in High School - Dr Meera Viswanathan
Transcript
- Marci Grossman (00:16) Hello, I'm MoneyMarci. Welcome. I am thrilled to welcome today's guest, Dr. Meera Viswanathan. Dr. Meera Viswanathan joined the Ethel Walker School 10 years ago from Brown University, where she was an associate professor of comparative literature and East Asian studies. A lifelong educator and scholar, Meera holds her undergraduate degree, her MA, and a PhD from Stanford University. Meera was born in Madras, India and emigrated at age five to Los Angeles. Meera joined Brown University as a Japan Foundation postdoctoral fellow in the Comparative Literature and East Asian Studies departments. Subsequently, she became an assistant professor and was promoted with tenure. Meera, who is fluent in seven languages including French, German, Latin, Classical Greek, Old English, and Old Norse, received several National Endowment for the Humanities grants and awards while at Brown. Meera and her husband, Dr. Eric Widmer, former head of school at Deerfield Academy, were asked by King Abdullah II of Jordan to establish King's Academy, the Middle East's first co-educational college preparatory boarding school with financial aid. The school opened in 2007. Meera served as the school's principal architect of the curriculum and dean of faculty. King Abdullah II personally awarded Meera the King Hussein Medal, Jordan's highest honor, for her endeavors. Marci Grossman (01:58) Welcome Meera! Though I guess in hopes of your students listening to this episode I'm not sure if I should be calling you Ms Viz. So I reached out to you after reading the Wall Street Journal article about how the Ethel Walker School was teaching financial literacy and personal finance. And for my listeners who may not have seen the article, can you talk about some of the components of the financial literacy program at Ethel Walker? Meera Viswanathan (02:06) Thank you. Happy to do so. Thank you so much for having me. The financial literacy program at Walker's is part of a larger program called the Walker's Capabilities Approach. And financial fluency is one of those areas that women generally have not had entrees into. And when I was a college professor, I noticed that many of my female econ majors had very little or no experience in things like investing or taxes. And so when I came to be head of the Ethel Walker School, I thought, wouldn't it be great to see what we could do in terms of helping girls gain a kind of awareness of the financial sort of landscape. One of the first things we did was in thinking about community partnerships, I learned from the United Way that there was a wonderful program called VITA run by the IRS and the United Way. VITA is the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance Program. And they talked about college students and law school students the IRS tax exam after studying the code and then helping lower income families claim their guaranteed income tax credits and refunds. And I said, well, how old do have to be to do that? And they said, well, at least 16. But we don't think that it's right for high school students. I said, well, I bet some of our students could do it. And a few weeks later, a dozen of our students had passed the exam. And now every junior at our school passes the IRS exam for that year. And then a group of them, usually about 25 or 30, work in Hartford from January until April, one day a week for a couple of hours, helping families and individuals who are in need of help filing their taxes. And in the six years, obviously we couldn't do it during COVID, but in the six years we've been able to operate in Hartford, that small group has brought back over a million dollars to families in that limited interval in terms of tax credits and Marci Grossman (04:37) That is a worthwhile project both for your students and for the community. I participated in VITA when I was an accounting student and it taught me a lot about the basics of tax preparation as well as a better understanding of the reality of various financial situations that people live in. Meera Viswanathan (04:56) The other part of our financial fluency is of course we have personal finance, but the other exceptional part is that in the sophomore year, we... have, thanks to the largesse of a grandparent who started the program and now are trustees, we give our sophomores a seminar on financial markets, on the stock market. And then we give them $1,000 to invest. And then they learn over the next two and a half years to track whatever stock or fund that they've chosen to invest in. And then they group together in portfolios and Marci Grossman (05:17) you Meera Viswanathan (05:34) in the three years we've done the program, they've not only beaten the markets every year, but they've also beaten our professionals as part of our finance committee in the trustee group. And so it's been a very successful program. And at the end of the first year, they asked us three questions. They said, one, you said it's important to hold on to stocks for a longer period of time. And we started the program in the senior year originally. And so we said, you're right. And so we moved it back to the sophomore year. And then the second thing they said to us, well, you keep talking about diversification as a way to hedge against the sort of volatility of the markets, but you're not letting us buy and sell, so how can we diversify? And so that was the second piece. And the third piece they said to us was, how do we make sure we know how to do this when we get to college? And so that's what we've built into our program. Marci Grossman (06:30) So while a lot of states have a requirement of one semester of personal finance or financial literacy to graduate, what you've done is create and implement a program that runs across multiple years into what you're running them as seminars rather than as a semester class. Meera Viswanathan (06:49) That's exactly right. And it's no longer a check the box. It's experiential, both of these things. So it's not simply I did it because it was required. It's wow, I never imagined. and the confidence, the secondary sort of impact of this is not only the sort of knowledge of the markets or about taxes, or even the ability to work with the community in offering some assistance. But I think it's the confidence that these young women gain having done this and it's become so much a part of the school that they don't think twice about it. No one says am I going to pass because everybody does and no one says you know will I be able to because we all do it. What's so interesting is then they discover that not the whole world is doing it yet. And that sort of astounds them. And so they go off to college feeling as though, sure, I can learn just about anything I need to learn. Marci Grossman (07:50) That's awesome. Now, you are the head of the school. You're not the person teaching the financial literacy curriculum. So you brought this to, they already had a curriculum going and you said, or you brought in... Meera Viswanathan (07:58) I am not. Well, they had a personal finance curriculum going, but we've added since my time the tax, the VITA program, and also the investment program. And the investment program started because I'm a dreamer. And I remember talking to a gathering of grandparents. learned to put my dreams out in public. And so I said, you know, my fantasy is I would love to be able to give the whole senior class $1,000 and a seminar investment and help them sort of learn how to do investments in the market. And one grandfather who looked a little bit sort of scowly during my comments, so thought, wow, I didn't reach that grandparent, came to me afterwards and said, OK, how many? And I said, how many what? And he said, how many seniors? I said, 50. He said, I'm writing you a check for $50,000 today. I want you to start that. This was May. He said, I want you to start the program in September. And that was how that program started. And then we needed, of course, since we pushed it back to the sophomore year, we needed to fund the two other classes. That was when our trustees said, you can take the money from the endowment, which was a huge act of trust. So we've done that. And in fact, as I've said, they've beaten our professional money managers. So they've increased our endowment. And so we're, I think, the only school in the country that can say, that our students manage a portion of our endowment investments, albeit a very small portion, but still how terrific is that? Marci Grossman (10:28) So I want to be clear for the audience, the school is not giving each student $1,000 to randomly invest. You're giving them $1,000 to manage within your endowment fund. In addition, for those who may not have the experience or exposure, I have sat on finance and endowment committees, and there are strict rules and guidelines for committees and the professionals they work with regarding risk tolerance, diversification, and allocations that guide how they are allowed to invest. The students did not have these types of restrictions. Meera Viswanathan (11:06) Precisely. Marci Grossman (11:08) Okay, that's incredible. That is, yes, trust and the generosity to get it started. And I know that you feel strongly about educating girls in finance and how critical that is. So can you talk about that a little bit more? Meera Viswanathan (11:25) Right. As I said, it's multi-pronged. One, it's about the fact that so many women my age and even younger really never had any training. We might have been terrific students. We might have taken even an econ course. But it doesn't mean we know anything about managing our own or in many cases women depend on their husbands to file taxes. And the ability of young girls to learn this and to know that they can do it. In fact, many of our students now pass the advanced VITA exam, which allows people to do more complicated returns. And they do this volitionally. So I'm very proud of that. The other piece of it, as I said, is what we notice with girls is often a confidence gap. That's what psychologists have termed it. It's the question of why is it that young women outperform young young men in secondary school, but then often it doesn't translate to activities beyond the classroom. And so how do we accomplish that? And so part of what this is all about is to embolden them to realize, of course they can do this. This is not a capacity question. And so as I say, the secondary impact of this is that they then realize, of course, just like learning to drive, most people can learn to drive. Most people can learn to do basic taxes, most people can learn basic things about investment. And of course, it's a stepping stone to other things as well. Marci Grossman (13:03) Right, and that's huge. Now, is Ethel Walker just a high school, a middle school, high school? What is the grades? Meera Viswanathan (13:13) It's a seven through 12 all-girl school. And we've actually, the original opportunity to do capabilities came from a very generous grant from the E.E. Ford Foundation, which funds secondary programs, initiatives, but only through nine through 12. So during the time of the original grant, we only focused on nine through 12. Now we've pushed financial fluency all the way back to the seventh grade. So beginning in the seventh grade, this is a topic we want to introduce to students. We don't want it to be awkward. We don't want it to be distant or some way off putting. This is another area of interest in the world. And so we want our students to be conversant. So it's a graduation through all of these different things. Marci Grossman (14:03) I love that. As my listeners know, talking about money and ways to encourage people to talk about money is near and dear to my heart. So I love what you are doing is bringing this as part of the conversation. What kind of projects do you start your seventh and eighth graders with? Meera Viswanathan (14:21) Well, mostly just sort of talking about money and compound interest and those kinds of things, which are of course good for the math, but also just good to be aware. And our students are also very entrepreneurial, so they're interested as well in the idea of business and ⁓ projects and fundraising. And so all of those are great topics, even in the middle school years. Marci Grossman (14:48) That's awesome because people haven't talked about money because their parents didn't talk about money because their parents didn't talk about money and then bringing that subject into the conversation is sometimes very difficult. Meera Viswanathan (15:04) That's exactly right. And also it is very gendered still. And so the more we can do to reduce that sort of gap, the better I think we all are going to be. And my hope actually with our program is to make it scalable. I don't want it just to be Ethel Walker. I love this school. I think it's a marvelous school, but I think we could sort of be the vanguard. And you know, the interesting thing about education is that it's not a zero-sum game. It's much more generative, fish and loaves metaphor. And the beauty part is no one has to unlearn for someone to learn. No one has to fail, actually, despite the bell curve. No one has to fail for somebody to excel. And in fact, the rising tide lifts all boats. And so what I find so interesting about education is that each piece sort of generates its own sort of abundance. And that's why I think I would love to take this program out to other schools, both public and in private. Marci Grossman (16:12) What do think it would take to bring it to a public school who wouldn't necessarily have an endowment to work with? Meera Viswanathan (16:17) Well, and I think there are a couple of ways it could work with a public school. One, you know, we picked a thousand dollars just because I wanted students to take themselves seriously. One, many schools do this using practice money, play money, monopoly money. And, you know, I think as long as students commit to it, I think you can do that. The second thing is it could be a smaller amount that you're investing as well. And, or it could be a group of students. And so parents could fundraise for a particular class to raise a smaller amount for them to do that. But I think the real difference is in many schools there are clubs and the students self-select themselves for those clubs, Particularly those students who have CPA mothers and fathers or CEOs or C-suite people tend to be the joiners of those clubs. What I think is interesting about our program is that every student does it. And the first year we had students who said, you know, we are anti-capitalist and we don't want to be part of this. And part of the question was, well, what do you want to do as an anti-capitalist? They said, we want to undermine the system. I said, how do you undermine a system where you don't understand it? And of course, to be working in our world is to be implicated in the system. And so do you understand that? So what was so interesting is I think those students too began to realize that this is about learning. This isn't necessarily ideological. Students may choose to do whatever they want with the knowledge they glean from this experience. But the critical thing is that we're teaching students how to think, not what to think. Marci Grossman (18:04) That's important. Money is a tool. No matter where you live, how you live, you are going to have to interact with money at some point. Meera Viswanathan (18:08) Thank you. Precisely, precisely. And again, it need not be your final end goal, but nevertheless to live in society means you have to understand the moneyed economy and your role in it. Marci Grossman (18:29) I love what you're doing at the school and I love the idea of getting high schoolers to do VITA. I VITA in college. I'm a second generation CPA, so I grew up having conversations about tax returns and all of those things. Bringing it to people at this younger stage and having them experience it is so important, so valuable. Bringing it to more women. There's opportunities for future careers that they may not have ever considered, as well as that confidence they'll be able to take into anything they do where they're going to intersect with money. Meera Viswanathan (19:10) That's right. And we had an interesting anecdote related to us by one of the first students to participate in this program. And she commented at a Walker's reception that when she applied for her first job, she was an econ major, I think she was a double major in econ and something else. She applied for her first job, which was in business. And she was prepared to talk about the courses she took, the grade point average, all of that. She had sent her resume in. And the interviewer said, I'm not really interested in talking about your college career or your grade point. He said, I just want to know one thing. How did you get certified as a legal tax preparer at the age of 16? And he proceeded to talk about VITA He said, you really did this? She said, oh, yes. Yes, I did. He said, OK, on the basis of that, I'm hiring. And so I think it's a profound transformative experience for the student, but I think it's a great calling card too. And you know, part of what makes it possible is technology. Because the first year we did this, and by the way, I passed the exam the first year because I thought, if I'm asking our students to do something bold, I better be willing to put myself on the line too. So with great trepidation, I studied and I passed as well that first year. What was so interesting the first year was there was a gigantic book, right, with the tax code for that year that we were all supposed to go through. But of course what happens is now it's all online and the testing is all online and it's so much more efficient because one can do all kinds of as opposed to flipping through a book and looking for a passage. And so I think that's one of the implications of technology now is that it has helped, how can I put it, de-professionalize certain areas. So for example, all of us now can download wills if we want a simple will. . We are the ones who tell our physicians often about new medications that we see advertised on television that they might not even know about yet. And what's interesting, I saw this as a college professor, that research that used to be done at the professoriate level and then the graduate level came down to the undergraduate. Now we're seeing those research opportunities, and I see this at our school, at the high school level. And so that's what's so interesting about technology. It doesn't mean that we don't need these sort of Uber professionals. We certainly do. But what it means is that there's so much more knowledge that used to be what we might call esoteric, which is now exoteric. That is, ordinary people have a chance to sort of deal with it and to be at least do simple operations. And that has changed our world, not only in terms of different groups of different backgrounds, but also in terms of age and gender. Marci Grossman (22:18) It certainly makes a lot of information much more accessible than it used to be. On the flip side, you have to make sure that you vet the sources before you get too ingrained in the information that they offer. Meera Viswanathan (22:27) size. And I think you have to digest the flood of information coming at you. And I think it's the processing. It used to be access to information. Now it's discernment and understanding what you're looking at. Marci Grossman (22:48) That is so true. What kind of textbook are you using for financial literacy? Meera Viswanathan (22:53) We're not using a textbook. We have a curriculum and slide decks have been developed, but it's self-created. Marci Grossman (22:57) Okay. Okay. Meera Viswanathan (23:04) And each iteration, each new teacher of it takes the previous and sort of elaborates. I'm making it sound very impressionistic, it's not. It's actually very rigorous. It started with one of our money managers, an all female firm, helping us put it together. And then the iterations are based on that. Marci Grossman (23:28) That sounds like a great way to do it since you can more easily adapt the curriculum to continually improve it for your population and opportunities. Marci Grossman (23:38) I know you have a time crunch, so I want to respect your time. Do you have anything you'd like to mention that maybe we haven't covered? Meera Viswanathan (23:47) Well honestly thinking about what new things we can come up with. And Marci, I would be delighted if you had some ideas. Somebody wrote to me after the Wall Street Journal article and said, have you thought about insurance? Have you thought about teaching insurance. And that's so interesting. And so I'm going to think about that and talk to some people, particularly because here we are in Simsbury, Connecticut, right next to Hartford, the sort of insurance capital of the country. And I think that has some interesting possibilities. I'm also thinking of entrepreneurship, honestly which is ways in which we can connect the financial knowledge, taxes and investments with actually the idea of starting businesses. And many of our students have ideas for businesses. We have a student with a patent pending for a really wonderful device that should she secure the patent, it may be our first self-made millionaire, multimillionaire, I don't know, billionaire, a student, which is terrific. And I think, again, what I'm interested in are ideas, and I'm interested in agency and in voice. So if any of you out there have ideas, I would love to hear them. And I think that's the key, which is, can we be attuned to possibility and receptive to considering things and be willing to pivot and make Marci Grossman (25:17) Have you considered with your investors and your grandparents and whatever else setting up a shark tank? Meera Viswanathan (25:24) Ooh, that's a really interesting idea. Marci Grossman (25:29) Because you probably have business people that can mentor and have connections. Meera Viswanathan (25:34) Right, and also the ability to write a business proposal. What are the constituent elements? What do you think about budget and timeline and staffing and product and all of that? That's a really wonderful idea and I think our students would have a lot of fun doing that too. Marci Grossman (25:40) Right. ⁓ Meera, thank you so much for being my guest today. We appreciate you taking the time to join us. Meera Viswanathan (25:56) Such a pleasure, Marci, and thank you so much and good luck to your future Marci Grossman (26:02) Thank you. To my listeners, I will be sharing a link to the Ethel Walker School in the show notes. Check them out. Don't forget to subscribe, leave us a review and stay tuned. I'll see you next time. This has been MoneyMarci on Marci Talks Money (and Life). You got this.