By Mark Scott
Buffalo, NY – Students from Clarence High School took top honors at Money-Skill Mania, a financial literacy competition held Tuesday at UB's Center for the Arts. The event, developed by UB Management Professor Emeritus Lewis Mandell, helps students make informed financial decisions on a variety of personal finance issues.
Eighty students from 15 high schools participated.
Jerome Trankle of Clarence High School was the highest-scoring individual student and was awarded a notebook computer. Trankle and his teammates from Clarence, William Harrington and Stephanie Kong, each received $250.
Teams from Sacred Heart Academy and the Harkness Center ended up second and third.
Tests of the financial knowledge of teenagers consistently show poor performance. For example, on the 2008 Jump$tart Survey of Financial Literacy among High School Students, a biennial survey of 12th graders, participants answered an average of only 48.3 percent of the test questions correctly. Over the past 10 years, scores have ranged from a high of 57 percent to the 2008 low of 48.3 percent all within the range of a failing grade.