Financial and demographic education effectiveness in academic and vocational high schools: a randomised experiment

This chapter evaluates the effectiveness of the Financial Education and Life Planning (FELIP) project, an intervention aimed at promoting financial and demographic literacy among high-school students in Lombardy, Northern Italy. The project – implemented at the school-level following a randomised design and targeting both “academic†and “vocational†schools – consisted in administering students a set of three video-based lectures followed by a class-based discussion. We show that students’ financial and demographic literacy improved as a result of the intervention, albeit differently across school types and groups of students. While financial literacy improved for all students in academic schools, gains in vocational schools were concentrated among the most academically-apt. Conversely, demographic literacy improved for all students in both types of schools. Interestingly, FELIP improved students’ opinions and attitudes towards information-seeking in vocational schools only, mainly by shifting their propensity towards life-planning. Overall, we highlight that a cost-effective and rather scalable intervention like FELIP reached students across both types of schools, yet proper policies could be targeted towards vulnerable groups, such as less academically-apt students in vocational schools.