Ask a typical Oxford student about their academic course, and they’ll happily ramble about the things they’ve learnt in great, riveting depth. Ask them instead about their intended career path, or how they plan to repay their student loan debt, and suddenly their response will be entirely unsure.
Young people have the lowest rates of financial literacy in the UK, and students are particularly imperilled by the £236 billion of outstanding student debt looming over graduates. Moreover, 35% of students who began their studies in 2023 are forecast to never fully repay their loans. Yet all too commonly I meet students who deem financial planning a secondary worry, something they’ll simply contemplate later. How on earth have we allowed such a disastrous attitude to spread unchecked?
As with most social phenomena, society’s upper echelons are far more responsible than they’d wish to admit. Few events in living memory embody ‘financial illiteracy’ quite like Liberation Day, wherein the US government raised tariffs to their highest effective rate in over 100 years. Aside from the following market crash and trade war, I recall being astounded by the government’s last-ditch attempt to justify their trade strategy: as economists swiftly noticed, the tariffs were entirely based on trade deficits, contradicting the narrative that these rates were reciprocal. In fact, I urge all readers to give the official methodology a read, as an exercise in sifting through substanceless, vaguely-economic gobbledegook. If this isn’t financial illiteracy at its worst, then God help us.
Domestic readers should keenly note that the future looks just as economically undisciplined within the UK. More than half of industry professionals have expressed no confidence in Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves, due to her documented inability to navigate the nation’s economic landscape. Aside from her quantitative failures, recall that our Chancellor is someone who lied about how long she worked at the Bank of England, plagiarised her book from Wikipedia, and claimed to have worked as an ‘economist’ within Halifax despite serving instead as a complaint-handler. Suddenly this lack of confidence makes more and more sense.
This is the stark reality for current students: by the time you graduate, the economy will almost certainly be in the hands of people who blatantly mismanage public funds, with painful consistency. But this should not be surprising – those that sway economic policy most tend to be politicians who are trained to win votes, not manage fiscal rules. Who could possibly blame students for expressing a little financial apathy, when our leaders rampantly prioritise their image over our livelihoods? If we were governed by professionals with a little more monetary finesse, I strongly doubt that it would be so culturally acceptable to be clueless with regard to finances.
Apart from lousy actors within politics, Britain is particularly riddled by poor mathematical ability, with half of the working-age population having the numeric skills of a primary school child. Mathematical capability is strongly correlated with sensible financial behaviour, yet when Prime Minister Rishi Sunak briefed the nation with plans to teach mathematics to every student up to the age of 18, many rushed to ‘defend’ our youth, with fears that we’d be transforming an entire generation into soulless data analysts (which was neither correct, nor particularly frightening).
This country has a serious cultural problem with numeracy. An inability to think mathematically should be treated with the same care and urgency as an inability to read, rather than brushed off as a non-serious quirk. Again, I hold our political leaders largely accountable for normalising the trend: one third of politicians are unable to calculate averages, and half cannot grasp extremely basic probability (flipping coins, specifically).
The path to financial literacy will, sadly, remain an extra-curricular one. With this country’s bafflingly complex taxation system, it is clear that financially illiterate workers make the most gullible taxpayers; the same is naturally true for those who have not been provided with an adequate mathematical education. Speaking cynically, banks and governments are incentivised by higher levels of personal debt (by profit and economic growth respectively), so they benefit from mass financial illiteracy. If you wish to improve your financial knowledge, the blunt truth is that you cannot depend on your country to honestly educate you.
This should only encourage, not deter, your own pursuit of financial acumen: financial literacy is no unattainable mystery after all. In fact, it has never been more accessible: all Oxford students happen to have free subscriptions to the Financial Times and The Economist. It’s up to you, dear reader, to make the effort. By all means, feel free to continue spending idiotically like most students – I personally was fined £150 for littering a cigarette end while drafting this very article – but invest some effort in educating yourself. You will only thank yourself in the years to come.
