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Wharton Allows Underserved High School Students To Earn College Credits

The Wharton School is offering college credits to underserved high school students in an effort to bring education opportunities to historically disadvantaged communities.

As part of the Wharton Pre-Baccalaureate Program, underserved high school juniors and seniors in Wharton’s Global Youth Program will now be able to take earn college credits and enroll in Wharton courses. The school partnered with the Education Equity Lab, a non-profit organization, to extend the reach of its Pre-Baccalaureate program to underserved communities in the U.S.

“It is an exciting opportunity to connect the world-class research and teaching of Wharton’s faculty and scholars directly to the high school classroom,” Wharton Global Youth Executive Director Eli Lesser tells Penn Today. “Our collaboration with the Education Equity Lab has been incredibly powerful as we try to inspire more students and educators to discover business and finance education and develop skills that will last a lifetime.”

TEACHING FINANCIAL LITERACY

Wharton and the Education Equity Lab also collaborated last year to offer underserved students a course that teaches them personal finance concepts and financial decision-making.

The “Essentials of Personal Finance” course teaches everything from defining and calculating simple and compound interest to the basics of the U.S. tax system. Students even learn ways to fund their college education and negotiation tactics for financial aid.

Students in the course participate in asynchronous lectures and also meet once a week with a Wharton MBA teaching assistant, who is responsible for creating lesson plans, teaching classroom concepts, and monitoring student progress.

“Financial literacy is such an important skill that is not taught enough,” says David Musto, the Ronald O. Perelman Professor in Finance at Wharton who helped develop and execute the course. “I was proud of the impact that the course had on talented students from financially stressed communities around the country. They realized what they were capable of achieving when they mastered the elements of a Wharton course in high school.”

Sebastian Dibenedetto is a sophomore from Engineering & Science University Magnet High School in New Haven, Connecticut who took the course. He says the lessons have had a large impact on his life.

“I am proud to say that I am going to be the first in my family to go to college, and it is opportunities like this that set me on the right path and gave me the confidence that I need,” he says. “No matter what profession you go into, we will all use the lessons taught in Professor Musto’s course.

Sources: Penn Today, Wharton, Wharton

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