Here’s a case study showing how someone transformed a desire for teaching college students about money into a successful venture.

Adam Chadwick had a dream: he wanted to learn how to teach college students about money. As a community college guidance counselor, Adam had heard a lot about the financial challenges students faced. Oftentimes these problems led them to drop out. His target audience was the 800 new students who entered the college each year. He just needed to know how to help this group of students fit money management learning into their hectic schedules and how to most effectively teach money skills. Adam talked with the Dean of Admissions, who suggested putting financial literacy lessons into the student orientation and college newspaper.

In determining how to teach college students about money, Adam had an initial goal of presenting a personal finance lesson in the new student orientation. Because only a little time would be allocated, he was OK with just providing an overview to start. He would pursue the newspaper angle to include more content over the long-term. His objective for the first presentation was to cover college funding options, to help students address their money challenges so they could stay in school.

After Dr. Sumner had clarified her short-term and longer-term objectives, she shifted focus toward choosing delivery methods for teaching financial literacy to college students.

Now that Adam knew what he was shooting for at present and in the future, his next move in how to teach college students about money was choosing delivery method(s). He landed on a hybrid of delivery, realizing that live instruction would work best at the orientation with follow-up lessons to be conducted in the newspaper and online.

Adam had learned that higher education funding was a major need to address when teaching college students about money. For the orientation overview, he opted to cover ways to pay for college and how higher education figures into career planning. Given the time available, he thought he could best meet his goal of teaching students about money and the importance of students stay in school by sticking to these topics.

Next on the agenda for how to teach college students about money was for Adam to locate a qualified instructor. He needed someone with both proven teaching skills and content knowledge. Again, he asked the Dean of Admissions, who put him in touch with a graduate of the CFEI (Certified Financial Education Instructor) coursework offered by the NFEC.

Adam knew that the curriculum he chose for teaching college students about money would need to be flexible and adaptable to accommodate any schedule, so he could pick and choose the lessons students most needed. He met these needs by choosing an independent, compliance-approved package with a modular design.

All 800 new students were required to attend the orientation. Adam administered the same brief test before and after the lesson, on which students showed average improvement of 27%. Compiling these data into a report gave Adam a tool he could use to raise awareness among faculty, staff, and the community about the success of his program.