Symposium Helps Participants Enhance Financial Literacy Efforts

When Jeanelle Soto-Quintana and Cindy Mihelich returned to Pueblo Community College after attending a financial literacy symposium, they put what they learned into practice. They created a plan to begin helping their students learn the budgeting and financial management skills they need.

“If we don’t help them develop those skills, they’re not going to get them,” Soto-Quintana says. “You can have an academically smart student making a lot of awful decisions.”

Soto-Quintana, director of retention at the Pueblo, Colo., college, and Mihelich, vice president of student services, were among nearly 150 people attending the recent Institute for Higher Education Policy Symposium on Financial Literacy and College Success at Minority-Serving Institutions in San Antonio, Texas.

Sponsored by USA Funds^®, the symposium featured information about the best practices of institutions offering financial literacy programs, online tools available to students, how to assess financial literacy programs, and an update on the reauthorization of higher education legislation.

“It was very useful,” Soto-Quintana says of the symposium. “We could see that we weren’t the only ones struggling with getting financial literacy information to our students. We learned a lot of practical techniques and ideas of how to implement programs.”

New, existing programs
The event had two main goals: Helping schools identify new ways to use the options already in place on their campuses, and helping them discover how to develop new tools and programs for students.

“We provided a framework for institutions to assess current campus financial literacy practices and to learn about additional tools and strategies to improve student success through enhanced financial awareness,” says Lacey Leegwater, director of programs and planning at the institute.

“Participants left with strategies for crafting cohesive financial literacy programs that are integrated into broader institutional retention strategies,” Leegwater says.

Pueblo Community College, which is located about 100 miles south of Denver, serves about 5,800 students who are enrolled in three campuses in Southern Colorado. The College offers a freshman seminar class that focuses on student success, but Soto-Quintana says only a small portion of the class focuses on financial literacy. She is working with the college’s curriculum committee to either design a new mandatory course or expand the freshman seminar class to help students develop the financial awareness they need to be successful.

Soto-Quintana and Mihelich plan to implement two types of workshops during the upcoming fall semester. One set of workshops will help raise awareness of financial literacy topics for the college’s students. The other workshops will aim to help students who have lost their eligibility for federal financial aid to regain that eligibility.

“We have a responsibility to do this,” she says.

Other plans
Other symposium participants indicated they would take similar action on their campuses. When asked in evaluations what new programs or activities institutions would consider adding as an outcome of the symposium, Leegwater says responses included the following:

• Implementing a first-year program or required course on financial literacy for freshmen.
• Establishing a peer-to-peer financial program led by students.
• Developing online financial literacy tools.
• Creating workshops for students, parents and employees.
• Beginning the process of the I-4 paradigm to develop and assess financial literacy programs and tools.