Before schools can teach compound interest or explain how a mortgage works, students need to be numerate — and a growing body of international data suggests most curricula are failing on exactly that front. PISA 2022 recorded the steepest fall in mathematics performance in the assessment’s history.
The OECD average dropped 15 points in a single cycle — three times larger than any previous consecutive change — and one in four 15-year-olds now falls below the basic maths threshold.
The same data shows a direct, structural correlation between mathematical proficiency and financial literacy scores.
In this article, I unpack what the data really shows, why the decline is structural rather than pandemic-driven, and what it means for the long-term prospects of financial education, with a particular look at Norway, a country that illustrates the paradox with unusual clarity.
I recall my maths teacher once telling us:
There are three types of people in the world: those who can count, and those who cannot.
We laughed. Data suggests we probably shouldn’t have.
Financial Illiteracy
Norway: A Cautionary Tale for a Wealthy Nation
Despite ranking among the world's wealthiest countries — and holding a sovereign wealth fund exceeding USD 1.7 trillion — Norway's 15-year-olds recorded one of the steepest mathematics declines of any OECD country in 2022. High national wealth does not immunise a population against financial illiteracy.
Why Poor Math Skills Are the Hidden Barrier to Financial Literacy
There is a conversation happening in education policy circles that rarely makes it into articles about financial literacy.
It goes roughly like this:
If students cannot calculate a percentage, interpret a simple graph, or reason with ratios, then no amount of personal finance curriculum will help them. You cannot teach someone to evaluate a mortgage rate if they cannot first understand what a rate means.
The data, gathered from some of the most rigorous international assessments in existence, is beginning to confirm what many teachers have quietly suspected for years.
Poor math skills are not just a classroom inconvenience — they are the prerequisite gap on which everything else depends.
Mathematical proficiency is not a nice-to-have before financial education begins. It is the foundation.
A Crisis in the Classroom: What the Numbers Say
In December 2023, the OECD published the results of PISA 2022, the most comprehensive international assessment of 15-year-old students in mathematics, reading, and science. It covers around 90 countries and economies, testing approximately 690,000 students as a representative sample of roughly 29 million 15-year-olds worldwide.
The mathematics results were, by the OECD’s own description, unprecedented.
The OECD average mathematics score fell by 15 points between 2018 and 2022 — equivalent to roughly three-quarters of a year’s worth of learning, and three times larger than any previous consecutive change in the assessment’s history. For context, no single-cycle shift had previously exceeded five points. This was not a fluctuation. It was a structural break.
The consequences are already visible at the bottom of the distribution. As of 2022, one in four 15-year-olds across the OECD now falls below the Level 2 baseline in mathematics — the minimum threshold at which students can interpret simple situations mathematically, apply basic algorithms, and reason with elementary number concepts. In 18 countries and economies, more than 60% of 15-year-olds fall below that line.
The trend has not been limited to schools. PIAAC 2023, which tracks adult competencies across 24 countries, recorded a 7-point fall in adult numeracy and a 12-point fall in literacy between 2017 and 2023.
The pattern mirrors what is happening in classrooms: top performers remain broadly stable while the bottom of the distribution falls fastest. Poor math skills, in other words, are not a school problem — they are a generational one.
The Decline Started Before COVID
It would be convenient to attribute these results to the pandemic, and COVID-19 certainly played a role. But the data does not support that as the primary explanation. Andreas Schleicher, the OECD’s Director of Education, noted at the report’s launch that structural factors — not the pandemic — are the most likely permanent drivers.
The evidence backs him up. Between 2003 and 2018 — a 15-year period that predates COVID entirely — the OECD average mathematics score fell by 11 points. Then, in just four years between 2018 and 2022, it fell a further 15. The four-year drop was larger than the preceding 15-year decline. The pandemic accelerated a trend that was already embedded in education systems before any school closed its doors.
This distinction matters enormously for policy. If poor math skills are a COVID side-effect, the response is recovery: more teaching hours, targeted catch-up programmes, and additional resources. If they are structural, the response requires something more fundamental — a rethinking of how and how much mathematics is being taught, and what it is being traded against.
The Direct Line to Financial Literacy
PISA 2022 included an optional financial literacy assessment, administered to students in 20 countries and economies, including Norway, the Netherlands, the United States, Italy, and Denmark. The correlation between mathematics performance and financial literacy performance was strong and consistent across all participating countries.
This is not a coincidence. It is structural. Many of the most consequential financial decisions a person will make in their lifetime — whether to fix or float a mortgage, how to read the real cost of credit, how compound interest accumulates over decades — require the kind of quantitative reasoning that mathematics education builds. Without numeracy, financial concepts do not just remain abstract; they remain inaccessible.
Among students in the OECD countries assessed, 18% lack basic proficiency in financial literacy — meaning they cannot apply financial knowledge to real-life decisions. The behaviour gap between those who achieve financial literacy proficiency and those who do not is substantial: high performers are 72% more likely to save money regularly and 50% more likely to compare prices before purchasing. These are not small margins. They describe fundamentally different financial lives.
Perhaps the most striking research finding comes not from international assessments but from a study by researchers at Harvard Business School, Wellesley College, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Examining the effect of state-mandated personal finance courses in the United States, they found a precisely estimated zero effect on asset accumulation, investment income, and credit management. Additional mathematics education, by contrast, produced strong and consistent improvements in financial outcomes. The authors’ conclusion was direct: many finance questions are, at their core, maths questions. Poor math skills cannot be papered over with a personal finance course.
Norway: A Cautionary Tale
Norway illustrates the paradox with unusual clarity. It is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, home to a sovereign wealth fund exceeding USD 2 trillion (and growing). According to the 2015 S&P Global FinLit Survey, its adult financial literacy rate ranks among the highest in the world, alongside Denmark and Sweden. Based on PIAAC 2023 data, Norway ranks 4th globally in adult numeracy, 22 points above the OECD average.
Norwegian students report the highest rate of money conversations with their parents among all countries in the PISA 2022 financial literacy assessment — 71% discuss spending and saving with their families at least monthly.
And yet, Norway recorded one of the steepest declines in mathematics among OECD countries in PISA 2022.
Its score fell from a peak of 501 in 2015 to 468 in 2022 — a drop of 33 points, more than double the OECD average decline, and the country’s lowest mathematics score on record. For the first time, Norway fell below the OECD average. The share of Norwegian students below the Level 2 maths baseline rose by 9 percentage points between 2012 and 2022, from 22% to 31%.
Norway also offers one genuinely positive data point. It is among a small group of countries — alongside Bulgaria, Malaysia, and the UAE — where girls outperformed boys in the PISA 2022 financial literacy assessment, reversing the typical OECD pattern. This is likely a reflection of Norway’s strong culture of financial conversation at home, which appears to reduce the confidence gap that elsewhere disadvantages girls in money matters.
But the broader trajectory is a warning. Norway’s world-leading adult financial literacy was built on a numeracy foundation that is now eroding. Culture and family engagement can compensate for poor math skills in the short term. Over a generation, they cannot.
Today’s 15-year-olds are tomorrow’s borrowers, investors, and pension planners. If the maths floor continues to fall, Norway’s financial literacy rankings will eventually follow — with roughly a 20-year lag.
What This Means in Practice
The implications of this data are not abstract. If poor math skills are the foundation on which financial illiteracy is built, then countries and curricula that treat financial education as a standalone subject — or worse, allow it to substitute for core mathematics — are building on sand.
Some US states already permit students to fulfil mathematics requirements with personal finance courses. The research is unambiguous on what this trades away. Teaching a student to balance a budget without teaching them to reason quantitatively produces someone who can follow a template, not someone who can adapt to unfamiliar financial decisions.
The more effective model, supported by both PISA data and the Harvard research, is integration: teaching financial concepts through mathematics lessons, not instead of them. When compound interest is the vehicle for learning exponential functions, both the maths and the financial reasoning land together. When students practise ratio reasoning through mortgage comparisons, the numeracy and the financial judgement reinforce each other.
This is not a counsel of despair. Norway, the Nordic countries broadly, and a handful of high-performing East Asian systems demonstrate that strong financial literacy outcomes are achievable — but they tend to share a common thread: robust numeracy education, not just financial education programmes layered on top of it.
The Bottom Line
The OECD’s PISA 2022 data tells a story that financial educators need to hear: poor math skills are not background noise. They are a direct threat to financial literacy outcomes, and the problem has been building structurally for at least two decades.
The 15-point drop in the OECD mathematics average is three times larger than any previous cycle. One in four OECD teenagers now lacks the numeracy baseline to engage meaningfully with financial concepts. Adults are following the same trajectory. And the research shows that mandating personal finance courses alone does nothing — while more mathematics education moves the needle.
Before any of us can teach someone to think clearly about money, we need to ensure they can think clearly with numbers. That prerequisite is quietly slipping away. The data says it is time to take that seriously.
OECD PISA Math Ranking 2003-2022
Check out the ranking that has evolved over the years. In this example, I have highlighted Norway’s results.
Data sources: OECD PISA 2022 Results (Volumes I & IV) · TIMSS 2023 (NCES) · PIAAC 2023 · S&P Global Financial Literacy Survey · Shastry et al., Journal of Human Resources (Harvard Business School / Wellesley / Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago).
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