Higher ed loves its fads — and one of the hottest fads of the moment is “financial literacy.”

Financial literacy is the ability to understand how money works in the world: how someone manages to earn or make it, how that person manages it, how he/she invests it (turn it into more) and how that person donates it to help others.

See that student short of money for college? He needs financial education to learn how to FAFSA.

See that student asking his financial aid officer for more support, since the end of the money came before the end of the month? He needs financial education to learn how to budget.

See that homeless student sleeping in his car outside of her Biology class? He needs to financial education to accept “personal responsibility” and learn how to get and keep a job.

Pointing to students’ lack of financial literacy as the primary cause of financial challenges is about as popular right now as pointing to their lack of grit. There are dozens of products marketed (with big price tags but sans positive impacts) to colleges and universities across the country who are concerned that students find them unaffordable, or are borrowing “too much” money (or not enough), or are choosing majors that won’t lead to payoffs commensurate with their expected debt levels.

This focus on financial literacy is misplaced. At best it distracts from the real problems in higher education, which include prices so high and a college financing system so complicated that you practically need graduate work in order to effectively pay for college. At worst, it disappears the broader political economy of college financing, placing blame on individuals and serving to perpetuate the structures that harm them.

Economists Darrick Hamilton and William Darity, Jr. offer a beautiful illustration of this challenge in a new paper on education, financial literacy, and the racial wealth gap. Much like explanations for racial and class disparities in higher education, popular explanations for racial disparities in wealth focus on the poor financial choices and decision-making by people of color. But as the authors point out, the “framing is wrong — the directional emphasis is wrong. It is more likely that meager economic circumstance — not poor decisionmaking or deficient knowledge — constrains choice itself.”

Indeed. “Financial behavior and financial literacy are practically limited for households and race groups with little to no finances to manage.” It’s not that students of color — or students from low-income families — don’t understand the importance of saving. It’s that they don’t have money to save!

This fact cannot come as a surprise. The question is who benefits from ignoring it, and instead investing in financial education rather than lowering the price of college? Answer: the political and economic elite, who — as Hamilton and Darrity explain —employ a “neoliberal perspective, where the free market, as long as individual agents are properly incentivized, is supposed to be the solution to all our problems, economic or otherwise.”

That perspective is getting us nowhere when it comes to improving educational opportunities in this country. There are real reasons why so many students do not have enough money for college. Let’s focus our attention where it matters most and not (intentionally or otherwise) distract from serious structural challenges by pretending like these are personal problems of individuals effectively addressed by financial education. Instead, do the following: