After watching her mother’s struggle with managing personal finances when she was in the eighth grade, Tanvee Patankar ’18 was inspired to dig deeper into finance management for minors. By exploring the opportunities given to her, she found success and was given the opportunity to speak at Ted Talks.

While attending Aptakisic Junior High, Patankar joined a Ted Education club, which informed her of economic conferences and conventions in the community. These conferences gathered groups of students who were passionate about making an economic change.

“While trying to discover what opportunities were given to minors and younger students, I realized that no schools around here have a personal finance class,” Patankar said. “That’s concerning since students fresh out of high school, mostly ages 18-24, are the students who struggle the most with credit scores, loans and other financial issues.”

This past August, the opportunity arose for Patankar to apply for a Ted Talk simulated event. She applied and got in. When asked to speak for Ted Talks, she introduced her petition for introducing finance management to students as a mandatory course in their high school career.

“With students being about $30,000 in debt once they leave college, the community needs to be aware of how much knowledge they are actually missing regarding their finances,” Patankar said.

Even in the nearby community, there are a number of adults, especially young adults, who don’t have any knowledge of how to manage the money they have on a credit card, said Ed Pavlovich, Fifth Third Bank Lincolnshire branch manager. While Pavlovich believes that there should be an introduction as early as the sixth grade, it is especially crucial for high school and college students to become responsible for their own money and learn how to manage mobile and online banking, in addition to traditional banking facilities as well.

Most banks let parents connect their children to their secured card account, starting off the child’s credit score at 16 and letting them develop responsibility on saving and spending money responsibly, fully supporting the ideals of Patankar’s petition for expanding financial education.