Program teaches college students time- and money-management skills

Life-Skills Course Helps Prepare Students for Life

INDIANAPOLIS — USA Funds^®, the nation's leading education-loan guarantor, announces the availability of Life Skills^SM. This flexible training program equips postsecondary institutions to teach their students to budget their time and money wisely in school and after graduation.

USA Funds designed Life Skills to meet the needs of financial-aid professionals, college students and their parents, who agreed that information previously available did not prepare students for the money-management and time-management responsibilities they face. There is no other program like Life Skills now offered to postsecondary institutions.

Life Skills teaches basic strategies for managing finances and for completing degree work in a timely manner. The course also supports efforts by financial-aid professionals to be good stewards of their institution's education-loan default rate.

"While federal education-loan default rates have reached historic lows, too many students leave school with student-loan and credit-card debt that they do not know how to manage," said Carl C. Dalstrom, USA Funds president and CEO. "Through Life Skills and other initiatives, USA Funds is partnering with schools and lenders to help students use their time and money more wisely and avoid student-loan default and other potential pitfalls of excessive debt."

Life Skills features five independent but interrelated sessions. Financial-aid professionals may present each session individually as a one-hour workshop, or deliver the entire series as a four-hour course with a one-hour refresher. Each module includes an instructor training manual, a student skills book, presentation slides, a video and an interactive CD-ROM with student skill-building activities.

The modules cover the following strategies and skills:

• Creating and living within a budget while in school and after graduation.

• Obtaining financial aid and student loans to pay college costs.

• Using credit cards wisely.

• Developing good study habits to succeed in school and complete college in a timely manner.

• Understanding loan-repayment options, responsibilities and obligations.

• Honing job-search tactics to gain employment following graduation.

"Life Skills makes meaningful and relevant connections to life outside the confines of the classroom walls," said Annita Huff, director of Financial Aid at Washburn University in Topeka, Kan., which helped pilot Life Skills in 2001. "And when this happens, it's a 'win-win' for students, families, the school and the entire community."

Life Skills is part of a multi-million-dollar initiative launched by USA Funds in 1999 to help postsecondary institutions achieve measurable reductions in their student-loan default rates. USA Funds offers the free program to its customers, to all Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and tribally controlled schools, and to all schools in the eight states that USA Funds serves as the designated guarantor of federal education loans. USA Funds is the designated guarantor in Arizona, Hawaii and the Pacific Islands, Indiana, Kansas, Maryland, Mississippi, Nevada and Wyoming.