Synchrony Bets on Teachers to Fix Financial Literacy

Here’s a number worth sitting with: 39.

That’s how many states now require personal finance coursework before students can walk across a graduation stage. That’s not a pilot program or an experiment. That’s three-quarters of the country deciding, officially, that kids need to understand money before they go out into the world and spend it.

And yet.

The gap between passing a mandate and actually equipping students to understand a credit card statement, a loan, or a budget is wide enough to drive a truck through. Which is exactly why Synchrony just committed $2 million to do something about it.

The Mandate Problem Nobody Talks About

When Denise Yap, president of the Synchrony Foundation, started digging into why financial literacy outcomes weren’t improving despite all those state requirements, she told Karen Webster that the answer wasn’t hard to find. It was standing at the front of the classroom.

Teachers.

“Knowing that, and knowing just how stretched teachers are in so many ways (time-wise, resource-wise), we thought this would be a good area for us to support,” Yap told Webster.

“Think about what we’re actually asking educators to do here. We’ve replaced Home Ec and shop class with personal finance, and then handed teachers a requirement without the training, materials or support to execute it well. They’re assembling lesson plans from scratch, sourcing their own resources, and adapting content they weren’t trained to teach, she continued.

Synchrony’s initiative takes direct aim at that gap, funding nonprofit partners who provide professional development, classroom resources, and financial counseling services for teachers themselves. Yap said that educators face their own money challenges, and it’s pretty hard to teach confidence about personal finance when you’re anxious about your own.

Why ‘Personal Finance’ Is Harder to Teach Than Algebra

Yap said that there’s something genuinely tricky about financial literacy as a subject: it resists standardization.

“Personal finance is a personal journey,” Yap said. And she’s right.

Unlike history or chemistry, personal finance is contextual, variable, and deeply tied to the circumstances of each student’s life. The family that talks openly about money at the dinner table is the exception, not the rule. Most kids are going to enter adulthood having absorbed whatever they picked up by accident, which is to say, not much.

What Yap argues, compellingly in fact, is that the goal shouldn’t be immediate mastery. It should be retention. Plant the seed. Make sure students have the vocabulary and the mental framework so that when they’re standing in front of a mortgage officer at 27, or staring at a credit card offer in their inbox, something clicks.

She also said that what a student learns in the classroom can ripple outward.

“Could a student learn something and say, ‘This might be useful information for my parents,’ and share it with them? I think that can happen,” she explained.

That’s financial literacy as a household intervention, not just an individual one.

From Check-Writing to Getting in the Game

What makes this initiative interesting beyond the dollar figure is how Synchrony is deploying it.

The company has stood up a Financial Literacy Service Corps, training its own employees to go into classrooms not as volunteers with a brochure, but as facilitators. There’s an important distinction there. Yap was clear about it: “We are teaching our employees to not only become facilitators, but engagers.”

Translation: interactive, not passive. The goal is student participation, not a corporate PowerPoint.

She said that the early response from Synchrony employees has been strong, and that matters, because employee energy is what sustains these programs when the initial enthusiasm fades.

Yap has thought about the sustainability question, too. She described the evolution from what she called “checkbook philanthropy”: the companies that write a check and move on, with no deeper involvement. Today’s programs, in her view, must be something that requires actual organizational commitment.

“The strength of a corporate philanthropy program involves various voices and assets,” she said. Meaning: employees, community partners, nonprofit partners, and leadership buy-in all have to pull in the same direction.

The Equity Argument

There’s a thread running through all of this that Yap surfaced directly: “We think it’s an equity issue.”

Not every student has parents who can explain a W-2, walk them through opening a bank account, or explain the difference between a debit and credit card. Not every neighborhood has the same access to financial guidance. The students who come from households where money is discussed openly have a head start that has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with circumstance.

That’s the actual problem Synchrony is trying to solve: not just literacy in the abstract, but access to the foundational knowledge that levels the playing field before young people make their first consequential financial decisions.

“Having pieces of information in your head that you can piece together later on in life is very valuable,” Yap said.

Something that becomes a lot easier when someone took the time to actually teach them to you.