Financial Literacy 101 Learning Model

One of the ways Financial Literacy 101 is unique in the world of financial education services is its prevention-based learning model. While there is nothing wrong with simply distributing financial literacy brochures or linking to static web pages about financial literacy, our position is that those efforts are not likely to lead to the desired outcomes of lower overall educational debt and financial preparedness for the college experience. At Decision Partners, we approach financial literacy education as not only a knowledge issue, but also as a behavior issue that is ideally addressed at the community level.

Motivating students to budget their money, refuse credit card offers, and make other responsible financial choices requires interventions similar to those required to motivate any kind of behavior change. For the college community, one of the most pervasive and challenging problems has been alcohol prevention. As schools became more aware of the problem and as attitudes towards binge drinking began to change, the campus community developed programs to try to prevent the problem - primarily with brochures and lectures. The result? Such programs have been proven to be ineffective in reducing rates of alcohol abuse as measured through a host of studies. In the 1990s, schools began using intervention techniques co-opted from the medical community such as motivational interviewing and expectancy challenges. As the result of changing the educational model from knowledge-only to knowledge and self reflection, positive changes were realized. (For more information on alcohol prevention and proven effective prevention techniques, visit the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism's College Drinking Prevention web site and read their "Call to Action" report.)

So what does financial literacy have to do with binge drinking? More than one would expect. Both involve predictable student behavior and both can be substantially remediated by motivating students to engage in simple protective behaviors. Alcohol prevention educators took 10-15 years to find out that the problem needed to be approached in ways that involve more than brochures or scare tactics. Our fear is that schools will repeat this lengthy learning process with respect to the student indebtedness crisis - relying on ineffective brochures and static web pages while rates of student debt soar to new levels each year, often due to absolutely predictable behaviors including the misuse of credit cards and the lack of budgeting. This is why our programs not only include proven prevention techniques such as expectancy challenges and personalized feedback, but actually provide schools with the ability to educate large groups of students simultaneously.

At Decision Partners, we look forward to working with schools to address the serious problem of student indebtedness through financial literacy education with programs that offer quantifiable results and that provide the metrics needed for independent analysis.

For more information on our prevention-focused learning model, please download the following presentation. Delivered at a JumpStart conference in 2007, it covers our approach quickly and may be easily shared with others on your campus. Please note that the presentation uses our TuitionEdu product (not Financial Literacy 101) for illustration purposes.

Click to download PowerPoint presentation.

For more information on Financial Literacy 101, please contact us.