OPINION: How Mason Can Improve Our Education

By Broadside Opinion Editor Arthur Gailes

No school ever taught me to balance a checkbook. I never went over interest rates in high school. And George Mason University never taught me anything about mortgage rates. But as an English major, I have been forced to learn about rocks.

This lack of real-life education in our schools has plagued our education for decades, and it needs to be fixed.
As students, we have all been victimized by standardized education. We’re forced to learn things in high school and college that we will never apply in our real lives.

And that would be O.K, except for the fact that our education is being neglected to do it. Advanced math and science courses are wasted on most of the student population, and they should not be required for students who are not pursuing a degree where those skills are relevant.

Instead, Mason needs to teach us how to financially compete in a changing and frightening world market. Mason needs to prepare its students how to manage money when it’s tight and how to invest when we become successful.

We need to know the difference between smart loans and bad loans, and how to tell when credit card or mortgage companies are taking advantage of us.

Nationally, our economic discussion has changed from whether we are in a recession to how long it will last. We blame predatory lending companies for much of this problem, but they are only half of the equation. Big lending companies can only take advantage of us if we are poorly equipped to evaluate their proposals and make deals that benefit both sides. And the only way we can be ready for that battle is if we are educated well in finance and economics.

We need to establish a university-wide introductory finance course. As of right now, all finance courses are 300-level or above. However, those of us who are not finance majors have a great need to be educated in the basics of financial management. Right now, Mason has no requirement of any kind of finance, economic or business course and it’s up to us to fit those into holes we may or may not have in our schedule.

This course would teach us the basics of managing credit, knowing our credit limitations, and balancing our expenses with our budget.

In any time, financial management is a primary concern to every single person. It’s more important than any other one field of study and for our school to not educate us in it is, ironically, a waste of our money.

Mason’s entire purpose is to make sure we are the best equipped to go in the world and make money. It’s nice for us to have fulfilling careers, serve the world population, and be happy, but the bottom line is that college is meant to make us richer than we would be otherwise.

Second, we need to be required to take Economics 100: Economics as a Citizen. As great as it would be for us to better our understanding of finance as individuals, we need a greater understanding of how these principles affect the rest of the country and world. In the current crisis, we need to know how our individual decisions are relevant in a greater world sense, and how our broader economic scene relates back to us as individuals. The course is described as a “broad introduction to economic concepts and how they can contribute to a better understanding of the world around us.” In this time, there are few things more important to us.

Third, we need to establish a finance course that exists strictly to teach us the fundamentals of saving and investing money. In this course, we’d learn the basics of the stock market and other forms of investment. We would also go over the best ways to practically save money for people and families in various income brackets.

Those nine extra credits of general education requirements would come out of the requirements that we already have. We could cut out three credits of science, fine arts and English that are required for people not in those programs.

Instead, we would have a curriculum that more accurately reflects our needs as citizens. As a progressive school, Mason has a duty to make sure that its students are prepared for real-life situations, and required finance courses for students will achieve that goal.