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Financial Coaching - Helping Students Become Financially Empowered

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Orange 7 Student Success
Wednesday, October 30, 2019
10:45 AM - 11:15 AM
Orange 7 (Student Success)

Speaker

Ms. Suzanne Matthews
Director, Center For Financial And Economic Education

Financial Coaching - Helping Students Become Financially Empowered

10:45 AM - 11:15 AM

Full Abstract

This interactive presentation will provide the audience with an introduction to financial coaching, highlighting how it can help college students learn to manage their personal finances and build financial capability as an important component of life skills needed for success in college and beyond.
This conference focuses on strategies for student success, and yet not one of the topics offered includes the role of financial capability in helping students persist in college and to graduate. Colleges forget that if students are financially fragile, or in economic trouble, are more like to face roadblocks or to drop out.
Four years ago, WCC launched the Money Smart Forum, a pilot program which provided one-on-one financial coaching for students, with an objective of helping them build healthy financial behaviors around saving, budgeting, managing money, and building credit. In that period of time, we have had over 600 students participate in the program, and we have documented the financial skills they have gained to help them better navigate their financial lives. WCC is one of the few colleges in the U.S. and the only college in the SUNY system that offer this type of financial coaching as a service to students.
Through our financial coaching program, WCC has been able to establish a set of best practices and strategies that we believe will be of interest to other SUNY schools. We will discuss various ways to integrate financial coaching into programs and services on typical campuses.
This presentation will highlight the importance of financial capability for college students and will demonstrate how financial coaching can be an important component of strategies for student success.
The presentation will engage the audience with a group activity to determine financial awareness.
The main takeaways from this session are:
• Financial capability needs to be a component of the success strategy for any college.
• Financial coaching is an effective way to help students build healthy financial behaviors and to foster success in college and beyond.
• Financial education activities that colleges can be integrated into a number of services offered on any college campus.
We will also provide resources that participants can use on their campuses, as well as an interactive exercise that will involve the audience.

Presentation Slides

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