USA Funds Program Prompts Change in Spending Habits

Editor’s Note: The following is a feature from the USA Funds^® 2007 annual report. USA Funds Education Access Report is highlighting the students featured in the annual report to show how USA Funds is getting results for students. To access the full report online, you’ll need Adobe Reader.

Thanks to USA Funds Life Skills^®, Tricia Rader has money management savvy that will pay dividends throughout her career at Midwestern University and beyond.

From making small sacrifices that add up to significant money savings, to limiting her education loan debt, Rader says USA Funds Life Skills lessons now are evident in many aspects of her daily life.

“USA Funds Life Skills puts everything in day-to-day terms,” says Rader. “It shows how much money you can save over a year on things you can really see yourself purchasing. Now I try to buy my coffee at the grocery store. I pack my lunch. I don’t just spend money based on a limit I have on a credit card. I work to save money.”

Rader is a first-year pharmacy student who attended a USA Funds Life Skills training session as part of student orientation last fall at Midwestern University’s Glendale, Ariz., campus.

USA Funds Life Skills is a financial literacy curriculum that helps schools teach students to manage time and money wisely while on campus and after they graduate. The program helps students understand basic strategies for managing their finances and for completing their degree work in a timely manner, and supports efforts by financial aid professionals to be good stewards of their institutions’ education loan default rates. USA Funds Life Skills also supports institutions’ student retention initiatives.

Nationwide, more than 500 schools have implemented the financial literacy program since its introduction in 2002. During 2007, 351 schools ordered USA Funds Life Skills materials.

Midwestern University presents the USA Funds Life Skills module “Take Stock — Devising a Realistic Plan” to its students during first-year orientation at both of its campuses — in Glendale and in Downers Grove, Ill.

About 90 percent of Midwestern’s 3,500 students receive financial aid, with many accumulating nearly $200,000 in education loan debt. But Rader is putting what she learned through USA Funds Life Skills to work to help her minimize the debt she’ll face when she graduates in 2010.

“It was shocking to me just how much the debt can build up with interest,” she says. “I knew it was a lot, but I’d never computed the numbers before this training.”

To help reduce the amount of money she must borrow, she now holds two part-time jobs — one as a waitress and one as a sales person at a boutique. Rader, who received a bachelor’s degree in microbiology from Arizona State University in Tempe, Ariz., hopes one day to be a pharmacist in a clinical setting.

Stories like Rader’s aren’t unusual for the approximately 6,000 Midwestern students who have completed USA Funds Life Skills training over the last five years, says Kim Brown, the university’s director of student financial services and registrars.

At the end of some USA Funds Life Skills sessions Brown has presented, students have approached her to see how they can return education loan money they’ve decided they don’t need.

Brown helped create the curriculum as a member of the USA Funds Default Prevention Council. Now Midwestern is helping USA Funds test an online version of USA Funds Life Skills.

And Rader says she welcomes the opportunity to be a part of future training through the financial literacy program — whether it’s online or through group training sessions.

“Unfortunately, there’s no mandatory training like this in life to tell you the outcomes of taking out a student loan,” Rader says. “So any USA Funds Life Skills training a student can get definitely is worth the time.”