How smartphones can make students smarter in financial literacy and other important nonacademic skills - FINANCIAL-24
Spend your days helping students find success in the classroom-to-career journey, and you are bound to confront a confounding irony. Students typically drop out of school because of difficulty with personal finances. Most are in good academic standing when they leave school. In other words, a nonacademic factor – financial stress – is heavily influencing academic outcomes.
When we consider this in the context of financial aid, the irony becomes more striking. Although Federal Student Aid provides more than $150 billion in federal grants, loans and work-study funds each year, only about 60 percent of Americans who begin college actually complete a degree. Yet students have amassed over $1.3 trillion in outstanding student loan debt. There are more than 40 million borrowers, and the average debt burden is greater than $30,000. That’s not to suggest student loans don’t provide vital access to higher education. But if students aren’t empowered with the knowledge to use resources effectively, they can become unintended impediments to success. Students need a clear understanding of how the decisions they make today are likely to affect the aspirations they have for tomorrow.
For example, school loans are often the first credit extended to students, especially underserved students. Yet most students do not attend personal finance classes or workshops in high school or college. More than half of them decide on their own how much they need to borrow to pay for school.
Although this trend is troubling, it highlights a rich opportunity for schools to add value to the educational experience. Understandably focused on academic learning, few institutions have the resources to individually counsel each student about practical decisions that have a lifetime of implications. So, we decided to offer the next-best thing: a “virtual personal assistant.”
Enter the smart phone. It acts as the brains of Success Center, a “best of both worlds” student success program that is built with new technology but grounded in well-established best practices. Student resources compete for time on a cluttered playing field. That’s where Success Center shines. By transforming the ever-present smart phone into a student success champion, Success Center makes both content and delivery responsive and more effective.
To further ensure relevancy, we formed advisory boards of students and academic experts from around the country to help guide development. Their input continues to drive improvement today. Although financial literacy is a dominant theme in preparing students for success, by no means is it the only one. In fact, our advisory boards identified seven insight pillars that form the foundation of Success Center’s content. They begin with college and career planning and continue through job hunting and managing student debt.
Success Center also draws from our years of experience providing traditional life skills training, including data from more than one million self-improvement courses already completed. Our experience shows that nine out of 10 students report making at least one positive behavioral change after completing such courses. More than 85 percent of students say it is likely they will use tools provided or suggested in the courses.
But by upgrading our content and delivery to an interactive, adaptive platform that spans pre-college, college, and post-college challenges and opportunities, we are on a course to help more students and schools than ever before. By being available for students whenever and wherever it’s most convenient for them, Success Center’s technology boosts motivation and creates a personalized environment in which students develop skills linked to retention and completion. In fact, our app learns more about students as they interact with it. It delivers material in “bite size” portions through modules that schools arrange to form a customized curriculum that meets the campus community’s specific needs. Dynamic, multimedia content allows students with diverse learning styles and preferences to follow their progress as they master material over time.
Convenient for students, the m-learning environment also frees up limited campus resources required for traditional student success outreach. At the same time, Success Center generates data that schools can use to track usage and measure benefits in many ways. From the student perspective, Success Center is a virtual personal assistant. From the institutional perspective, it is a student success technology that helps them ensure students are receiving the value they expect from higher education. After all, for students, it makes no difference if it is a nonacademic issue that stymies their academic aspirations.
Ultimately, Success Center is a breakthrough approach to an old challenge: helping students unlock the lifetime of opportunity promised by higher education. By transforming the everyday smart phone, we’re helping more students transform into successful alumni and institutional ambassadors.
When we consider this in the context of financial aid, the irony becomes more striking. Although Federal Student Aid provides more than $150 billion in federal grants, loans and work-study funds each year, only about 60 percent of Americans who begin college actually complete a degree. Yet students have amassed over $1.3 trillion in outstanding student loan debt. There are more than 40 million borrowers, and the average debt burden is greater than $30,000. That’s not to suggest student loans don’t provide vital access to higher education. But if students aren’t empowered with the knowledge to use resources effectively, they can become unintended impediments to success. Students need a clear understanding of how the decisions they make today are likely to affect the aspirations they have for tomorrow.For example, school loans are often the first credit extended to students, especially underserved students. Yet most students do not attend personal finance classes or workshops in high school or college. More than half of them decide on their own how much they need to borrow to pay for school.
Although this trend is troubling, it highlights a rich opportunity for schools to add value to the educational experience. Understandably focused on academic learning, few institutions have the resources to individually counsel each student about practical decisions that have a lifetime of implications. So, we decided to offer the next-best thing: a “virtual personal assistant.”
Enter the smart phone. It acts as the brains of Success Center, a “best of both worlds” student success program that is built with new technology but grounded in well-established best practices. Student resources compete for time on a cluttered playing field. That’s where Success Center shines. By transforming the ever-present smart phone into a student success champion, Success Center makes both content and delivery responsive and more effective.
To further ensure relevancy, we formed advisory boards of students and academic experts from around the country to help guide development. Their input continues to drive improvement today. Although financial literacy is a dominant theme in preparing students for success, by no means is it the only one. In fact, our advisory boards identified seven insight pillars that form the foundation of Success Center’s content. They begin with college and career planning and continue through job hunting and managing student debt.
Success Center also draws from our years of experience providing traditional life skills training, including data from more than one million self-improvement courses already completed. Our experience shows that nine out of 10 students report making at least one positive behavioral change after completing such courses. More than 85 percent of students say it is likely they will use tools provided or suggested in the courses.
But by upgrading our content and delivery to an interactive, adaptive platform that spans pre-college, college, and post-college challenges and opportunities, we are on a course to help more students and schools than ever before. By being available for students whenever and wherever it’s most convenient for them, Success Center’s technology boosts motivation and creates a personalized environment in which students develop skills linked to retention and completion. In fact, our app learns more about students as they interact with it. It delivers material in “bite size” portions through modules that schools arrange to form a customized curriculum that meets the campus community’s specific needs. Dynamic, multimedia content allows students with diverse learning styles and preferences to follow their progress as they master material over time.
Convenient for students, the m-learning environment also frees up limited campus resources required for traditional student success outreach. At the same time, Success Center generates data that schools can use to track usage and measure benefits in many ways. From the student perspective, Success Center is a virtual personal assistant. From the institutional perspective, it is a student success technology that helps them ensure students are receiving the value they expect from higher education. After all, for students, it makes no difference if it is a nonacademic issue that stymies their academic aspirations.
Ultimately, Success Center is a breakthrough approach to an old challenge: helping students unlock the lifetime of opportunity promised by higher education. By transforming the everyday smart phone, we’re helping more students transform into successful alumni and institutional ambassadors.
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