Many thousands of UK families are launching one of their brood into undergraduate life. Some have sat on overstuffed suitcases in an effort to do the zips up. Others have debated the logistics of squeezing a drum kit into a Renault Clio. Parents have dispensed advice on adult sexual relationships to kids amid excruciating mutual embarrassment.
Chats about the other British taboo — money — may have been equally faltering. Families will already have answered the essential question of how university costs will be met, provisionally at least. Many freshers will remain as unfamiliar with day-to-day money management as they are with set texts they were supposed to read over the summer.
Financial illiteracy is among the many defects us older people reflexively discern in the young. Under-18s scored an average of 2.3 correct answers out of 10 in a UK quiz run by the Centre for Economics and Business Research and financial website Wealthify. Mean scores rose steadily with age.
Younger Americans also underperformed in a seven-question online financial test set by the US Financial Regulatory Authority.
I scored top marks in these quizzes. So I should, given my profession. But the exercise left me sceptical about the helpfulness of such assessments when applied to the young. The CEBR quiz rewarded me for knowing when the UK tax year started. Finra gave me a point for understanding the relationship between base rates and bond prices.
