THE TL; DR: college students want to learn how to manage their future incomes.

Financially Illiterate

My freshman year, I joined the CMU chapter of an organization called Moneythink, a non-profit started at UChicago focused on bringing financial literacy curricula to underserved schools all over the nation. I was placed in Westinghouse High School with students with learning disabilities, and later learned that the classroom I worked in was infamous around the Pittsburgh Public Schools teacher core. This didn't mean that my kids were bad or behaved poorly; they were sweet, kind, thoughtful, and ambitious. They forced me to question who I was volunteering for, and why the work I did was important. I am thankful for the experience. It also forced me to consider my own privileges I was afforded throughout my childhood, as well as the full education I had gotten in fiscal responsibility before even graduating high school. I'd come back to campus and talk about it with my friends, only to find out that they didn't know nearly as much as they wanted to about managing their incomes, debt, and general finances.

Armed with this information, I set forward with a friend to build an entire class based on financial literacy for the college student, that would be available for course credit at Carnegie Mellon. CMU offers a special opportunity called StuCo, where students can lead courses that other students can take. We thought this was the best avenue to offer financial literacy opportunities, given that course credit forces students to continue coming to class on a somewhat dry subject. After writing a proposal and getting our curriculum approved, we were set to open the class for registration for the spring of my sophomore year.

The Curriculum

Syllabus by week:

1) Financial Freedom, Net Worth, and Budgeting
2) Checking, Saving, Brokerage Banking, and Loans
3) Credit Cards and Credit Scores
4) Insurance and Retirement
5) Real Estate and Car Purchases
6) The History of Investment, and Booms and Busts
7) Investing--The Portfolio that doesn't play the market
8) Putting it all together

Additionally, we would meet with each student personally to talk about their financial situations, and help them apply to the concepts to their own lifestyles. The meetings went extremely well, with students seeming notably calmer after applying their own knowledge to their lifestyles to understand how to deal with their own student debt.

After the first eight weeks, we spend the last three weeks of class working to put together a Life Action Plan, which was relatively dramatic terminology for a five year fiscal plan, planning for everything from retirement savings to apartment hunting, to a yearly budget. The plans were amazing, with students researching in-depth into what cars, apartments, and investments they could afford. Students walked out of the course with a proficiency in money management.

Results

Within the first time offering the course, the class was overregistered by 200%, with us attempting to let as many students off of the waitlist as possible. Students left noting that they felt more competent and confident in dealing with their finances. The class, while no longer being taught by myself or my friend, is still offered at CMU today.