Finance Classes for High School Students Near Me

Success in finance and investing requires more than luck and gut feelings. Learning solid financial skills involves learning how to track the movement of markets, understand the complex structures of financial institutions, and work with newly developing technologies that make it easier to track trends and make forecasts. Students interested in building a long-term investment plan, working in the financial industry, or just investing on the side will benefit from the training they will receive in a summer finance course.

Students enrolled in a finance summer program will learn the important skills they need to continue their financial education or make prudent financial decisions. Most courses teach students how to use Excel to track, organize, and analyze financial data, helping them keep better records of their own investments and prospective future investments. Students will also learn key terms, ideas, and theories of market management, including how to read and interpret publicly available financial information to evaluate whether a company is worth investing in.

Students may also learn the basics of financial technology (FinTech) to streamline and automate aspects of investing and finance. Classes like these will teach students how to use programming languages like Python to catalog better and organize financial data and information.

Why High Schoolers Should Learn Finance

High school students may want to learn finance skills in a summer program. Whether a student is interested in learning finance and investment as a possible career path or just wants to be more confident in their ability to handle their own money, enrolling in a summer finance skills program is a great way to build long-term success and independence.

Many of the skills you’ll learn in a summer finance program, like Excel, are practical in almost every professional context and are useful life skills to develop. Students learning to use Excel to track investment portfolios and financial data can apply those skills to their personal accounts and household finances.

Students can also take the skills they have learned in a finance summer course and use them to build a more financially stable life, getting started early on and building a knowledge base to prepare themselves for thinking in the long term. Learning personal investment and financial skills isn’t about getting rich overnight, but rather, it is about laying the foundation for financial stability over the long term.

Advanced training programs like a summer finance class will also help students succeed in future educational endeavors since they will understand the foundation needed to succeed in business and finance. High school students who want to study business or administration can use these courses to get a jumpstart on their training. Aspiring entrepreneurs will want to learn the technical aspects of building an investment portfolio.

Finally, summer courses in subjects like finance are a good way to help students build their resumes and prepare for college applications. Even for students who aren’t pursuing a future in business, learning these skills can be a useful item to include in a college application. Plus, many extracurricular organizations are looking for individuals with a background in these skills to serve as financial officers.

What You’ll Learn

Finance and investing is such a broad subject that students may not know what they will learn when they enroll in a course. Most finance training programs aim to teach students the basic elements of financial analysis and investment. These are not courses that provide investment advice. Rather, they are programs designed to teach students how to make prudent financial decisions and invest for their future. Students will learn how to manage their own portfolios, keep up to date on financial news, and read and interpret the often difficult financial reports companies make public.

Students may also learn important technological skills that assist them in making financial decisions. Some of these will be basic ideas, such as utilizing applications to facilitate buying and selling stocks. At the same time, other lessons will be more complex, such as learning to use the more advanced features of Microsoft Excel to store and analyze financial data. Students must consider how comfortable they are with technology and how much they want to focus on learning FinTech when enrolling in a class.

Finance or FinTech

One of the questions you’ll want to ask yourself when enrolling in a summer finance program is how much you want to emphasize the FinTech elements of finance training. While finance training and FinTech training are deeply intertwined, they are slightly different fields, and many courses will not have substantial overlap. Thus, students need to consider the differences between them when selecting a course.

Finance and investing courses tend to teach students the theories and practices that go into investing money in businesses and stocks. Students will learn how to read financial statements and reports, how to go about investing and buying assets in a company, and how to make decisions based on publicly available information. These classes aim to teach students the ins and outs of investing from a largely low-tech perspective. However, many classes teach students how to use programs like Excel to organize and query important financial data. These classes are ideal for students hoping to learn how to invest in their personal financial future or build a career in fields like accounting and money management.

FinTech deals with the more technologically-driven aspects of investing that have emerged in the past few years. Students enrolled in courses that focus on FinTech are likely to learn how to program applications in Python to assist in the investing process. Some of these programs collect and organize market data far faster than a human being could possibly manage. They also automate the buying and selling of assets once certain price points are reached and create data visualizations to communicate your findings with stakeholders and investment partners.

There is no correct way to learn finance and investing, though students should be aware that professional Investment Bankers, Portfolio Managers, and Financial Analysts are increasingly relying on FinTech programs to make consistently profitable investments and financial decisions for their clients. By contrast, learning data science skills can be time-consuming and expensive, making it less than ideal for students who aren’t planning on building a career in financial management. As a general rule, if you are learning financial skills for your own benefit, it is more important to learn finance and investing than FinTech.

In-Person Finance Classes

Students looking to learn finance and investing skills may want to consider enrolling in an in-person summer training program. These courses offer students the opportunity to learn from expert instructors in a classroom setting designed to facilitate their success. They will be able to learn alongside a cohort of like-minded students, which can provide valuable long-term networking opportunities, and they will be able to take advantage of a training center’s onsite technology.

Noble Desktop provides students with a search tool for finding summer finance programs available to high school students. This tool will help students narrow down their options and find the right course for them.

Students interested in learning a wide variety of finance skills may want to consider enrolling in NextGen Bootcamp’s Excel, Finance, & Investing Summer Program NYC. In this course, students will learn how to use advanced Microsoft Excel functionalities (like Pivot tables and database functions) and they will learn how to apply these skills to build financial records and databases. Students will also learn the basics of reading and interpreting financial reports and records and will receive training in the fundamentals of stock market investing.

Students looking to learn more of the data science aspects of finance and investing should consider NextGen’s FinTech Summer Program NYC. In this class, students will learn how to program using Python and use that programming knowledge to build specialized databases that assist in financial and investment decisions. Students will even learn how to program applications that automate tedious tasks to free themselves up for other investment projects. Both of these programs are taught in-person at NextGen Bootcamp’s Manhattan campus, so students in that area should consider the perks of enrolling in a live summer program.

UCLA offers an on-campus Introduction to Investment course for students interested in exploring finance and investing as a future career path. This class, which can be taken for college credit, trains students in high-level investment management strategies that can be utilized personally or professionally. Students enrolled in this course will learn how to build a personal financial strategy and how to further their education in finance to build a career out of money management and investment analysis.

Fordham University offers a hybrid-format collection of courses through the summer business program at their Gabelli School of Business. These courses include a Wall Street in the Classroom course, which aims to take high school students and offer them accelerated financial skills training over the course of a summer session. This course aims to provide students with a solid foundation in financial skills that they need to succeed in future college-level finance and investment training courses. In addition, students will have the opportunity to see the inner workings of a New York City finance firm as they interact with professional business executives.

Virtual Finance Classes

Some students may find that they are unable to find a live training program in their area that suits their needs. Other students prefer to avoid the hassles of traveling to a live campus. For these students, live online summer finance classes provide a solid alternative to in-person instruction. Students will be placed in digital classrooms with live instructors who can provide them with assistance and feedback as easily as if they were in the same classroom. Students can even permit their instructors to interact directly with their devices by using remote teaching software.

NextGen Bootcamp offers an Excel, Finance, & Investing Program and FinTech Summer Program as live online training courses. These classes will provide students with the same quality of education as their in-person counterparts from the convenience of a student’s home. Students will still be able to work directly with expert instructors, and class sizes will be kept small, so students aren’t struggling to get their teacher’s attention if they are having problems. Students will be responsible for supplying their own technology, but NextGen will provide set-up assistance to help ease students into the online learning environment.

Many colleges and universities offer online pre-college programs for students interested in learning investment skills. For example, Columbia University offers an online Introduction to Finance and Investment Management course, which aims to give students a feel for the kinds of lessons that they will learn in a college-level investment class. In this class, students will learn to understand the structure of financial systems and institutions to better participate in those systems. Students will also learn the specific functions of various investments and financial institutions, helping them make more informed decisions about handling their money.

How to Choose a Finance Class

Choosing a finance class can be difficult given that there are so many options available and so many routes you can choose to learn the skills. However, there are a few practical concerns that students will also want to consider. Students will need to determine whether or not they want to attend an in-person class and whether or not there are any in their area that provide the kinds of training they want to receive. They will also need to consider the price of a summer training course. On a less practical level, students will need to consider what kind of curriculum they prefer and whether there is a course that teaches them these subjects. For example, students may be more interested in specific areas of FinTech (like Cryptocurrency and blockchain) than in learning Excel organization skills, so students should narrow their search to courses that teach those subjects.