76 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2026 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL EDUCATION SUPPLEMENT progression of skills, but specifically for Microsoft Office apps. The courses are free, but each certification exam costs $100–$400. Before they head off to college or a gap year, make sure their phone is fully synced with their online personal calendar and email apps, and that they know how to sync to their future school and work accounts as well, so that they’ll never miss that important meeting with a professor or supervisor. Money Value In late 2026, the College Board’s Advanced Placement (AP) program introduced a new course and credit-validating test in “Business and Personal Finance.” In the marketing material for the new course, the sponsors cited declining employer Most of the teens I work with cannot really distinguish between the value of $1,000 and $10,000, and cannot connect either value to the labor, effort, or working hours represented by that amount. confidence in student readiness for the workforce, and a perception that high school students are disengaged with their own futures. From my own experience working with Foreign Service teens as they prepare for those same futures, I’ve seen some of that disengagement. But, perhaps particularly tied to their experiences as children in the Foreign Service, they’ve also exhibited a bewilderment about how money works. They can hypothesize the economic effects of social policies or perform compound interest calculations in the context of a math class, but applying that knowledge isn’t as personal for them as it may be for a generation raised on cash, balanced checkbooks, and bills paid not by direct withdrawal but by monthly remittance of paper in the mail.
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