NVC Students Take CashCourse to Top of List

Just two years ago, Northwest Vista College faculty and staff introduced CashCourse to the NVC community. On Dec. 10, the CashCourse organization said NVC is No. 4 on a top 10 list of colleges and universities that had the most web engagement out of 1,141 colleges and universities.

NVC and Santiago Canyon College in California are the only other two-year colleges on the list that consists of four-year universities.

Funded by the National Endowment for Financial Education, CashCourse is a free, online financial education resource to help students build the financial skills they need to get through school and to prepare for the future. CashCourse is only available to public and private nonprofit universities and colleges in the U.S.

One of the main ingredients for NVC’s success is making CashCourse a part of all SDEV and EDUC classes. Also when CashCourse was first introduced to NVC, it went from 158 users in the fall of 2016 to 2,498 users a year later, and 3,860 NVC users this semester. That’s a 2,343 percent increase! Last spring, students said in a survey that they were most interested in learning about saving and investing, followed by budgeting.

Another ingredient to boost CashCourse use on NVC was an “Eat. Drink. Study. Money” campaign that Lisa McGoldrick of the President’s Office took on with a team of people. Through a grant from One Main Financial, t-shirts were given to students, along with food and other goodies to encourage them to use CashCourse.

The team held two financial literacy town halls (one each semester) where students participated in round-table discussions to provide dialogue around what students wanted to know regarding financial literacy.

Also, financial literacy was added as a part of the What I Need (W.I.N.) resource fair held this past spring semester. The concept of the W.I.N. Resource Fair was born from the round-table discussions, and the name What I Need (WIN) was from Sharon Dresser.

The Council for Economic Education said only 20 states require students to take a high school economics course to graduate, and only 17 require a course in financial literacy.

Adjunct instructor Cyndi Grandt said that many of her students had an “eye-opener experience” with doing the modules in CashCourse, and “did not realize how much they did not know about credit and student loans.”

She added, “It is important that we education our First Time In College students with financial literacy early-on in college. It will help them make better decisions financially and also plan for their future.”