More New Mexico students are learning to manage their money. Will it break cycles of poverty?

On a Monday morning in August at Cibola High School, teacher Suzette Williams tells her students to open their laptops and get ready for the class period.

While Williams is a social studies teacher, she introduces the lesson by asking students if they’ve ever deposited money into a bank account and what their understanding of credit unions is.

This class period, she is not teaching social studies but a personal finance course. Under a new state law and recently passed district policy, Williams and many of her colleagues are now also educating students on how to balance their checkbooks.

A public policy research institute’s push to educate high school students on managing their money is gaining traction across the state — and at its largest school district.

Beginning this school year, all freshmen at Albuquerque Public Schools are required to take a financial literacy course to graduate, following a vote by the district’s board in January to make it a requirement.

“It’s really important to make sure that every student, no matter where they live, no matter what school, no matter their parent background or their extracurricular activities, they’re being given this fair chance at understanding financial literacy,” APS Board President Danielle Gonzales said in an interview.

More than half the state’s school districts have adopted Think New Mexico’s policy proposal to make financial literacy a high school graduation requirement, according to the nonpartisan think tank. The organization said in a release ahead of the school year that 49 of the state’s 89 school districts have now made financial literacy a requirement.

Twenty-nine states across the country require financial literacy in K-12 education, according to the National Endowment for Financial Education. In 2024, the New Mexico Legislature passed House Bill 171 — which Think New Mexico lobbied for — changing graduation requirements for the state’s high school students. One of the requirements added is a financial literacy course.

For APS, which Think New Mexico has called an early adopter, input from the community was just as crucial as the passed legislation.

“I think it’s important to note that we did a pretty intensive survey process in terms of families, teachers, students, (asking) ‘What do you want?’ And financial literacy rose to the top,” Sheri Jett, APS chief academic officer, said in a June interview. “We recognized that this was an area where students and families, I think, were not feeling as strongly as they would like to when they leave high school.”

Since the pandemic, the course has grown in popularity among APS students. During the 2021-22 school year, 2,374 students enrolled in the course; in 2022-23, 2,417 students enrolled; and in 2023-24, 2,523 students took the course, according to numbers provided by the district.

The course enrollment dipped slightly for the previous school year, with 2,474 students registering to take it. However, as it is now a requirement, more than 7,000 students are enrolled. The course is often taught by social studies teachers.

Students’ knowledge and experience of finances could fluctuate considerably from classroom to classroom. Within APS, seven of the district’s 13 primary high schools are classified as Title I schools, meaning 60% or more of their students are living in the district’s classification of poverty.

“We do have a curriculum framework that might be interpreted as one size fits all. This is to ensure that the teachers have guidance,” Jett said. “That being said … we all bring different experiences, and so part of this training, and part of as we grow the teacher professional development is, how do we use more student voice to drive what happens in the classroom? How do we find out what students know about money management?”

According to Lending Tree, New Mexico ranks 33rd highest nationally in credit card debt, with the average person carrying around $6,662 in debt for the first quarter of 2025 — a 10% increase from the previous year.

New Mexico is also one of the poorest states in the country with a median household income of $62,468, ranking it eighth lowest, according to WorldAtlas, a research company that publishes works on sociology, demography, environment, economics and politics.

It’s for these reasons and others that the requirement to teach the state’s students about how to manage their money excites Reilly White, associate professor of finance at the University of New Mexico.

“I think it’s critically important,” he said. “An interesting thing that’s come out in the last 10 or 20 years of research shows economic stability is deeply connected to individual and community health, so the Centers for Disease Control considers it a social determinant of health.”

White added that 1 in 5 New Mexico residents is “underbanked,” meaning they’re dependent on check-cashing services, payday loans or similar nonbank money transfer solutions. That number is higher than the national average, which the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. found to be 14% in 2023.

“When we look at the reasons New Mexico needs to do this, they’re numerous,” White said. “Many families are living paycheck to paycheck. Students have to contribute to household finances at an early age, and financial literacy has the ability to break cycles of generational poverty.”

But classroom learning about finances might not be enough on its own, according to Victor Wang, who heads a San Francisco-based startup called Stockpile, which touts itself as “the money app for families.”

“What we see is that states and school districts and so many people are putting in financial literacy programs, and there’s been a lot of people who are big proponents of it,” Wang said. “But the research has come out, and really, what it says is that financial literacy programs alone don’t change behavior.”

Wang said his startup’s research has been done by mental health experts and behavioral scientists, adding that “we’re not just a bunch of app developers.” He also said conversations about money between children and parents, and giving children controlled, real-world experience with money, can change behavior and habits around finances.

“What we really see is that just getting real hands-on learning is super critical,” Wang said. “Until it’s real, you don’t have emotional risk, you’re not concerned about, ‘Oh, well, what if I lose it?’ Well, in real life, you’re worried about losing real money.”

Editor's note: an earlier version of this story misspelled Victor Wang's name.