No college course that we know of provides a solid grounding in money management. Of course you can study accountancy, economics or financial management.

But this is big picture stuff, sorting out the finances of countries and big business. Personal finance is firmly off the syllabus.

This is an oversight that already costs society dearly and the bill will increase with growing affluence. Apathy, ignorance and inertia have got many people into serious financial scrapes in the past and, as the problem escalates, the government is belatedly giving consumers a crash course in financial management.

It is pouring millions into the new National Consumer Agency and the Financial Regulator, whose mandate includes consumer education. The government is also picking up the tab when things wrong, paying for the Financial Services Ombudsman, the Pensions Ombudsman and the Money Advice and Budgeting Service, which tries to sort out the mess left behind by people who are drowning in debt.

You have to wonder if some of this money would be better spent on prevention rather than cure. If we learnt more about money while at school, we would certainly be better equipped to handle it once we start earning. Efforts to tackle the problem later on in life are all well and good but it is hard to escape the conclusion that many of the government-backed initiatives are playing catch up rather than getting to the root of the problem.

The biggest obstacle to financial literacy is social.

It is certainly cool to have lots of money and we lost our inhibitions about flaunting what we've got a long time ago. But there is something socially suspect about displaying your knowledge of how this money might be put to work.

It takes a certain bravery to reveal the shortcomings in your knowledge of current affairs, sport or popular culture. But only an anorak would be happy to declare his or her knowledge of how the pensions system really works. This seems a strange mismatch in priorities because making the most of pension tax breaks will have a much bigger influence on our financial futures than whatever coalition of political parties is cobbled together after next year's general election.

So where do we start?

Debt education seems as good a place as any. Most of this year's freshers will have their first brush with borrowing over the coming months as they attempt to get the most out of college life while having little or no income.

If the banks are to be believed, students are a fairly sensible bunch, at least when it comes to money. Everyone suspected the worst when credit cards first appeared on college campuses a number of years ago. But the banks insist that students are more likely than the rest of us to pay back the money in full and on time.

The real trouble begins when students join the workforce because, invariably, their expectations will rise a lot faster than their earnings.

The problem is exacerbated by the property boom because, with the all-pervasive fear of being priced out of the market, people are jumping on the property ladder at a younger age.

This means taking on a mortgage and, according to new figures from the Irish Bankers' Federation, the average first-time buyer loan is just shy of 230,000. Rather than being gradually paid down over the years, mortgages tend to move in the opposite direction as we borrow more to trade up the property ladder or to finance our increasingly expensive lifestyles.

The good news is that we as a country have never had so much money to support these mortgages and other spending. It would be a tragedy if it all slipped through our fingers because we cannot get our heads around all this wealth.