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Hello everyone. Welcome to "Women and Money." We have some great presentations planned. We will leave plenty of time for your questions, especially about how to structure the courses, naming them, and all the amazing details that have made these two programs so successful. We will start with a short presentation from each speaker, then I will ask a few questions, and at the end we will allocate about 20 minutes for your answers. So if you have a question that really concerns you, we will definitely discuss it. Cecilia, do you want to start? Greetings to everyone. Thank you very much for joining our session on women and money. I am extremely excited to share with you information about our new general education course at Ohio State University. It's
called "Women and Money: Citizenship in the Modern World." The course is worth four credit hours- one more than usual, and for good reason-and is open to all undergraduate students at Ohio State University as part of our general education program. I myself am a professor and head of the Department of Consumer Sciences. I also direct our CFP program, the Certified Financial Planner program at Ohio State University. And yes, I developed the idea for this course, led its creation, and now I am also its co-author. We first offered the Women and Money course last spring, and a thousand students signed up, which was just wonderful and exciting, and this fall, when we're offering it for the second time, we already have 1,500 students.
Honestly, it could have been 2000, but for political reasons, as you know, other courses also want to have students. We were forced to limit the number to 1,500. Well, that's okay. The course focuses on citizenship, financial citizenship, and personal finance. So why does this course work? This is a general education course. We deliberately placed it where it is. It belongs to the subject in our curriculum that every university student must complete. So we included it in this mandatory topic, which is citizenship. This is a four- credit hour course, which is also very important because if students choose one such course, it replaces two three-credit hour courses. So, one course instead of two if it has four credit hours. So both of the first factors meet
students' expectations. And it is built very carefully. We have a simple and consistent weekly course structure. All lectures and all assignments are the same every week. So, our course covers all disciplines, so it should be understandable for both medical students and biologists or financiers. Clean design, easy course navigation with the same four interactive video lessons every week. We use ThingLink-a software package available at Ohio State University-to add questions and interactive elements to our lecture videos for greater engagement. Yes, the topic is relevant, students are interested. So, if we check all four boxes, they are also interested in personal finance. Yes, and it's an apt name. You won't believe it, "Women and Money"-it
just works. It's easy to remember, it's very important to have such a simple name, and it's everywhere: in links, in the short course title, in the course catalog. So I strongly recommend choosing a short and easy name. Here is our team. We have three teachers who teach the course and 31 assistants. I would like to introduce you to Wendy McBroom. She is our lead teacher. She teaches two of our four weekly lessons. It focuses on the foundation of everything: financial citizenship and personal finance lectures. She has 12 credit hours, and Debbie Sharp has been a faculty member in my department for many years, and she is a true expert in online
education. Her experience was simply critical to the creation of this course. She teaches an introductory lecture on citizenship. And then there's me, I'm giving a lecture on research, this is the fourth lecture, and I'm involved in a lot of the administrative issues of the course. Good. So, who are our students in the Women and Money course? I'll show you our data for the current fall semester. We have 1,500 students, and we are very proud that we have so many female students. You see 63% of women and about 1/3 of men. And in our core majors, like personal finance or certified financial planning, we barely have 20% women. So having a course that covers women- those who are in demand in the financial advisory industry-will hopefully help more women learn about
personal finance and financial planning, and then find our major or additional program in financial planning so that we can increase the number of women in this profession. We have about a quarter of our students, Janet, and most of them are from Ohio, which is very typical of Ohio State University. Here you see students taking courses. We have a lot of final year students. And, of course, students postpone Janet's courses until the very end of their studies at Ohio State University. Yes, that's why we're trying a new system for the spring: we're splitting the enrollment to get more students, almost more freshmen and sophomores, to have a more even distribution. Students by college, you see, and students by major.
Of course, the biggest attraction is finance, and a fairly significant portion of biology. Not sure how it happened, but we talked to academic advisors, we advertised it widely across campus. Mechanical engineering, chemical engineering. These students, you know, see four credit hours, a required topic, a check mark, I'm taking this course, no questions asked. And marketing, but other specialties. This is what our page looks like in Canvas. I know this is very detailed, but I wanted to show you this very structured, very clear view of the "start here" modules and lessons. We always start with a lesson on citizenship, financial citizenship, personal finance,
field research, and then the same assignments every week. This is always a test, this is always a post for discussion. There are life skills tasks, so we ask you to start investing, upload your credit history. We ask them to do all these things with their personal finances. So, for example, this week each student is asked to start investing with $5. And we have a field research assignment, which is a area that gives us a fourth credit hour, and we do an original research project. We ask students-this is a research project with a survey that we conduct with the class. We ask students to develop a research question, write a short research proposal, and use Google Forms to develop an online questionnaire.
We then ask each student to find five other students at Ohio State University to answer the survey. So, from the questions that students develop for the online survey, we created a final official survey, three different ones for the different topics we cover. And then each student in the class finds five other students at Ohio State University to answer the survey. So, we get about 1500*5 responses. We ask students to analyze data using AI, create infographics, and share the project with a friend who is not in the course or a family member. Uh, in the general curriculum, we should have a public impact component, and that's what we demonstrate at the end to explain the research project to someone in the public outside of the course. And here, uh, model. It always
looks the same, as easy to navigate as possible, no unnecessary junk or anything else. Very simple. Here is the video. This is a video about it. And, um, so easy navigation is the main thing. I strongly recommend keeping the design as simple and clean as possible. This works great. Yes. I'm a big.What do you mean by interactive lecture? Do students have to play a budget game, or is there some component of the quiz that is Quizzes. So, you might have software where questions are asked or comments are solicited after a slide. Yes, they are not graded, but they are there to, uh, guide students. So what are my recommendations, uh, when you're planning a course like this? Here are six unique features that I highly recommend all of you
consider. So, the first is the reuse of recorded guest lectures. We have two or three recorded guest lectures every week. Mostly, these are financial planners, lawyers, politicians, book authors, uh, who else do we have? Yes, but mostly financial advisors. The goal is to make it real, to help our students see the content, and then hear how it is applied every day in financial planning, in making financial decisions. So it worked really well-having recorded interviews with guest speakers in almost all of our classes. Um, every week, a few every week. Um, we received a $100,000 gift from Peggy Ruling. She owns, uh, an RIA, a financial planning firm in Columbus, and she made the development of this course possible.
Yes, I met Peggy. She supports women in every way and asked, "How much money do you need to create this course?" At lunch. And I said, "Yes, 100,000 will be enough." So it was her generous gift to, uh, allow me to bring in experts and create this course, uh , at Ohio State University. And I highly recommend not starting from scratch. Find a popular course at your educational institution even if it's on a different topic, but it's well-received, already popular, and just copy it. This is what we did. We had a very successful-we still have-a very successful course on nutrition and exercise. We took.we left the structure unchanged. We simply replaced the content. And it worked. And I did it again.
I have a new course starting this spring, "The Science of Personal Finance," where we connect math and science concepts to personal finance, with a greater emphasis on behavioral finance. . So, as you know, in the environment we work in, there are so many patterns and so many regulations. Therefore, creating everything from scratch is extremely difficult. I recommend using role models. What we also like to do in our course is we did away with the textbook. We use reading materials, short excerpts from different fields. So, for our citizenship lesson, we focus on literature. We take works such as Amanda Gorman's poem "The Hill We Climb," Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice,"
or Isabel Wilkerson's "The Warmth of Other Suns." We select several pages. So students are introduced to this important literature through citizenship. In Financial Citizenship, we focus primarily on economic articles. Anna Lusardi, of course, Lauren Willis, Claudia Goldin, and the book that we use a little bit more is "In This Economy" by Kayla Scanlon. It was recently published, very good, and perfectly suited to our level. When it comes to personal finance, we focus on bestsellers. Indeed, on bestsellers in personal finance. We have them all. We have Beth Kobliner who is present here. We have Vivian too. Ramit Sethi, Morgan Hausel.
Just subsections, you know, pages that correspond to the theme of the week. And for the field research lecture, we use scientific articles with survey results. This is attractive and broadens the horizons of students. I might recommend creating a website for the new course, especially since it's new and students won't sign up for a four-credit course without knowing what it's about. So we had a website with videos. You can watch it here. Take a look at it here. Some questions and answers. We received a lot of emails. As a male student, will I be able to attend this course? Yes, it is open to all Ohio State students. As a male student, will benefit from this course? Yes. This is general personal finance with application to
women's participation issues. neutral content, but all Janet courses should have practical application, and ours is female participation. Um, yes. A desire to innovate to really work with existing software packages to make courses understandable and seamless. Our students are used to social media. Everything is seamless there. Therefore, we need to use similar software packages to be attractive to young students. Um, and another focus is on digital accessibility, because almost 10% of our students have a disability status. So it should be available. And work as a team. Don't do this alone. Find a friend, a colleague you like, and work as a team. This is so important. Yes. This is so important. You also added a student to our course development team. We held
student focus groups on the structure and name. And um, it's much better to be on a team. I highly recommend this. So, my last slide. Um, I just wanted to thank Peggy Roullien, who made this course possible by providing me with the funding to hire the necessary professionals. And I also wanted to thank this conference, because 2 years ago I was here, just after receiving $100,000 from Peggy, looking for ideas, and I met Tori Ligon from the University of Arizona, where I knew she was already teaching a big personal finance course to a thousand students.
, and I was able to hire Tori as a consultant for our course. So, um, it's a great community, yeah. Please, I also wanted to emphasize that we are happy to share our course program and approval documents with everyone present. So thank you I have a completely different presentation than Cecilia's, as I will be talking about a financial literacy program for women that has been around for 25 years. And this year we celebrate this 25th anniversary. Um, the speaker who will open this celebration is John Campbell from Harvard, who has relaunched this whole field of family finance. So we're very excited about this. Um, let me briefly tell you a little bit about the program.
It started as " Women and Financial Independence." That's what WFI means. And this program started in 2001. A few years later, it evolved into the WFI Center as we continued to receive funding from various sources. And our goal was to educate women, our students, our graduates, and women in general, so that they would acquire financial knowledge and skills and be able to make good financial decisions. Ahem. We also knew before creating the program that effective personal finance education is not just about taking one course. This is lifelong learning. People change throughout their lives and need to learn different things. We are different at 20 than at 50 or 70, so we need to absorb different experiences. So we aimed to discuss this with our
students from the very beginning. We conducted research and based on it made decisions about the content of our courses. We interviewed our graduates, and they were educated women- at least with a bachelor's degree, some with a PhD, some with an MBA. So, we sent a survey to our alumni, and they responded-not all of them, but a significant number of them took the survey. And from this study, we found that overall, women have less financial literacy than men, even though we make up over 50% of the workforce in the United States. As you all know, women generally have a longer life expectancy than men, and therefore need to do more for their retirement. They need to have more savings and better, you know, investments for that.
We also see that there are still persistent income gaps between men and women, and women are experiencing career breaks. This means that due to caring for children or family, they leave work and come back, and every time you leave and come back, your income drops because of it. Therefore, they are less financially prepared for retirement. So, all of this turned out to be the result. And I want to tell you, I think not everyone knows that Smith is a women's college. So we don't have men, but we did a study on men's financial literacy compared to ours, and that's why we got these results. Ahem. Another thing that many people talked about then and I think still talk about now is the idea that if a woman doesn't understand personal finance, it's because
she doesn't have math skills or has insufficient math skills. So this question came up quite often in our survey of graduates in various formats. And we found that low levels of personal financial knowledge persisted even among women who had high levels of math knowledge. So the reason was not that they knew less math or lacked math knowledge. But the other thing we noticed was that even women who work in financial services, who are in leadership positions, who are managing directors, who are doing a good job, but they were not knowledgeable about their own personal finances. That is, their knowledge of personal finance is very different from their professional knowledge, even though both areas are related to finance.
We also found that older women and women with MBA degrees had significantly higher levels of financial knowledge than others. And I think that's logical for MBAs, but also for older women-I mean, not old, but older than 20 or 30-women who hit 50 know the most, because that's when we all start thinking about retirement. Therefore, we must learn how to prepare for retirement. So, this is really a special period for every person, particularly women, to start learning new things for this purpose in the future. Another thing we found out is that confidence really does matter. It's not just financial knowledge, but also confidence in your financial knowledge. I saw a lot of people talking about this during the previous presentation, and we
really saw that this was true for our graduates. So this is something we also plan to consider: teaching personal finance should help develop confidence in one's knowledge. Uh-huh. Here we are. So, how did we build the program? As Cecilia mentioned, the name of your courses, or for us-the name of the center and program- was very important. In 2001, when we spoke with our president, Ruth Simmons, who was a visionary at the time and had done incredible work for us. We had a large group of colleagues in the economics department with whom we discussed this center and the program, and everyone unanimously agreed that the name of the program should have the word "woman" in it to send a message: this is
important for women. We also had this saying, just think about it, it appeared in all our brochures. You are not truly independent until you are financially independent. My dad kept telling me that. So, we had great communication about our program back then. Almost every local newspaper I know, whether we had an announcement or not, wrote to me a couple of weeks later saying, "Wow, we didn't know we had a financial literacy program." They were very excited about it, as were the national media: the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and other publications. So we already had automatic advertising for this program. People found out that Smith College has such a program, and it is, in my opinion, a very academic college.
So it was a novelty for people who were thinking about educating their children or already had someone there, and it again attracted more funding for our program. As I said, after a while we started receiving letters from our graduates. We received letters from women who had no connection to Smith College. One woman sent a check for $50 and wrote, "My dream was for someone to create a program for women where they could learn about personal finance." It really helped us realize in a different way that we had a successful program. Funding was a community affair. These are all things we have to consider when you start a big program like WPI, or as Cecilia said, a personal finance course.
We received funding from our alumni. We received funding from financial institutions and endowments. So Cecilia asked for $100,000 when she wanted to start her course, talking to Goldman Sachs, who one of our alumni introduced us to. I asked for $1,000,000 and we got more, but they could afford it-it's different for one person. In 2016, the name of the Women and Financial Independence program was changed to the Jill Kerr Conway Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, in honor of our first female college president. It was a nice name, but it changed the effectiveness of our program because it no longer had a direct reference to financial education. So, um. Regarding our courses, we didn't offer just one course. We had a few courses, and you are
familiar with liberal arts colleges. Both the administration and the faculty are very picky about which courses should count as academic credit. This should be a purely academic approach, no professional training or anything like that. So we couldn't really offer a credit course. We knew it wouldn't pass approval. So we decided to offer our courses as non-credit courses and see what would come of it. We had three main courses: "Financing Life", "Principles of Investing", and " Interpreting Financial News", which was also important to understand daily events and connect them to what they were learning in class.
Um, it was a big success. There were over 100 students in each of these sessions, and the audience for our classes was, of course, our students. In addition, faculty members came to these sessions, especially for " Financing Life" and "Principles of Investing," and college staff also came. Um, yeah, um, oh, I'll tell you about that later, because it was really interesting. One of the employees came to each course every year. So it seems like for 20 years in a row he attended the same course on the same topic and took notes. And then he told us that he owed it to the program because he is now a millionaire, has put two kids through college, lives a good life, and still works at the college. So, you know, it's really satisfying, I have to say. The reason I
think this program was successful is, first of all, that we had the most popular professors on campus. When I listened to Justin Wolfers today, it reminded me of Randy Bartlett teaching " Financing Life." He named the course something that everyone liked, and graduates who liked the program wanted to change the names of their companies to " Funding Love," "Funding Life, " or "Women and Financial Independence." So it was quite interesting how catchy these names were. We did n't know it ourselves until we implemented them. So, we had great teachers who the students really like and trust. So many people came to these sessions. Um, we also offered these courses during lunch break. That is, from 12:00 to 13:00.
Students would come, and we would provide them with lunch. We had enough money to provide them with lunch. They liked it. Yes, and everyone else who came got a wonderful lunch, much better than the lunch in the dorm. So, and I think, as I mentioned before, the topics were interesting to many others as well. So, um, in addition to the courses, for each of them, especially for " Financing Life," in parallel, on a different day of the week, we invited professionals, local experts, to come and give a lecture on this topic. So, if Randy was talking about, you know, buying a house, we would have a real estate agent come in and talk about the process and stuff. That is, one course was actually two courses in one. We wanted to engage students from the beginning, starting and
continuing their financial education, to draw their attention to the fact that these are important topics that they should learn. So we held a seminar for freshmen called "Dollars and Common Sense: Budgeting in College." Many students came to this two- hour seminar and studied these issues. We also had another seminar at the end of their studies, when they were already graduating. So before graduation, you have to learn how to enter the real world and how to manage money. It was called "From Backpack to Briefcase." I don't know if that name is still apt, because women don't carry briefcases anymore, so.
Men don't either. Anyway, it was a two-hour intensive, and again, I would say almost 300 students came. And remember, Smith is a small college. The average size of our groups, I would say, is less than 50 people. We have a few courses where there are over 50, maybe 100, but on average there were less than 50 students in the groups. The situation has changed, and I want to talk about it. Challenges we faced: When we started the program, we didn't think about the teachers. We mentioned this at some point. We couldn't rely on them forever to teach these courses, and these were popular professors. faculty retirements: Randy and Roger Kaufman, who
taught courses in finance and investing. They retired, and we really have no one left. And the only one at the college at that time who taught finance had a bunch of other responsibilities. So we had to wait and think about what to do about it. We held our courses, as I said, during the lunch break. It was a very good time, because there were no other programs at lunchtime. No one held meetings or classes during lunchtime. So we were the only ones who suggested it. So our students could come to these conversations. And when colleagues or the college administration realized that it worked, everything is now offered during lunch. Faculty meetings take place during lunch. So, everything has changed. So, we had no opportunity costs, they were zero, and now
they are very high. They don't have time because they have other things to do. Um, that was a problem we had to face, but we have a colleague in the math department who teaches " Debunking the Myths About Money," um, fundamentals and investing. So , two courses about life financing and investing, here a different name. Um, and he uses behavioral finance to, you know, be more up-to-date in terms of people's behavior and how you can manage that in your finances. Attendance ranges from 30 to 50 people. It's not that big, but, um, in every class, and it's almost all the students. We don't have those wonderful staff and teachers, young female teachers, who would come up with this. Um, so we have a different kind of
program. If you have questions later, we can talk about, you know, when you're planning programs or courses, you have to see, think about the future, how you can continue to offer what's good and successful. And, um, so we can talk about that later if you're interested. The last thing after the changes we saw is that the focus has shifted more to equal education. Um, " financial mentors " is a program, I don't know if you're familiar with it, if you've heard of it or not. These are students called financial mentors, they gain financial knowledge, they undergo training, and, um, they have to take a course called "Debunking Finance." In addition to "Debunking Finance," they attend a seminar where they receive relevant
training. And, um, then students make an appointment with them come to them, ask their questions about personal finances. And it's easier for them to talk to their peers about things they don't know. They don't feel like, "Oh, my professor is going to find out I don't know anything and I." so they'll reach out to them more often. So, this has two benefits: if students turn to them to solve their problems, ask questions or get a referral to the right person to ask questions, it also strengthens the financial mentor's confidence that he is helping his fellow students. So, both dimensions are covered. So thank you very much. I'll just ask a few questions, and then we'll open the discussion to the audience. When we were doing our pre-launch calls and
describing, um, the process of launching these classes and creating them, one thing that you both mentioned very specifically, and that I found very interesting, was the importance of the name. And this has happened repeatedly. Cecilia, I wanted to start this question with you because you called your course " Women in Money." And I was really interested in what I assumed, of course -and I'm a big fan of "Women in Money" of course-but I would assume that men might not take this course. That he would be, but in fact 40% of your students are men. Was that, that is, was that a problem when you called the course "Women in Money," and why do so many men go to " Women in Money"?
I just, I mean, it's great that they're there, but I just want to know. It is so well placed, Cecilia. Loans. This is a credit. This is a mandatory topic. After all, this is a personal finance course. The application is women in economics and personal finance, but it is a general course on personal finance. Um, and it just needs to be well- placed to attract the attention of a wide range of students. What fascinated me so much was that the name didn't end up being exclusive. It became inclusive: women came, even though they hadn't come before, and men did n't seem to stop coming. no. Um, we were hoping for the opposite, that we would
attract women as much as men. Mhm. Because in our specialized courses, financial planning, we have so few women, and companies ask me for female graduates, and I have so few. So to see that this topic can be attractive to women is great. Hmm, the name was discussed a bit among colleagues. They were worried that it would n't attract a large audience. Uh, but, um, I was confident in this name, and our sponsor was confident in this name too. Um, that's why we have the second part of the title: citizenship in the modern world. Yes, Tori. Can I ask a follow-up question, because I don't really remember the details of when we discussed this. Right around the time we were talking about the name, Ohio passed a law against diversity courses,
many of us live in states where we've had to deal with that, but you pushed the name forward anyway. So, can you talk a little bit about the politics of this and how it happened? Uh, actually, I wouldn't want to. Okay. But is it fair to say that even in a state where there is a law prohibiting diversity-related topics, this course was approved? Yes. Well, so maybe one comment is. about our proposals, and as you know, for the new course now we have to submit pages of justifications. We tried to make the language very clear, very neutral.
It's about women's participation. So we followed all the instructions. Of course, we did that. We understood this perfectly well. And you know, AI helps a lot with this. Upload your document to AI, have it checked against the, and you'll have everything you need to fix. And that's exactly what we did to have a clean curriculum that can be approved in the current environment. And Manush, you also talked about the name of the course and how important it is. Yes, regarding the name of the program, everyone agreed that we should mention women to convey this message. This is for women. But we had teachers, some men, mostly young women, and all the staff who came when we gathered large
groups. That's it. And regarding the course titles, we wanted to convey the message: this course is about you financing the life you want, that you are financing your own life. We wanted to convey this message to them. And "Fundamentals of Investing" - we couldn't think of anything better. If you have better ideas, we will make them happen. We discussed this earlier during our phone conversation, the three of us. What surprised us all was that we had a lot of students. You have more than a lot of them, but we had a lot of them too. But we had almost no students in the humanities You know, we have 7% of everyone, and you have the same seven. Of the men who attend classes, are there any humanities majors among them?
There? I don't know. I don't have such data. That is, the data is there, but it has not been analyzed in this way. I don't know why we don't have more of them. Well, Anna-Maria told us: create a new course and call it " Financial Literacy for Poets." Such a smart suggestion. I would take this course. Any more questions? It seemed like someone was raising their hands. Em. Comment. Yes. I will add to your question. I'm in California, so maybe I can say this, but I run the Women in Leadership program. And for the last couple of years I've been asked, "Are you going to change the name?" due to anti-DEI policies. And I get
people calling me all the time and saying, "So, I'm a guy. Can I, can I be part of the program?" And I always say, "The word ' woman' includes men, so you know, I just want to share an experience, because we're doing a summer data demo lab. We have a lot of events, and we're noticing that women are participating because it says, ' organized by women leaders.' So our percentage, I mean, just entrepreneurship, you know, other activities, they don't come. But they come to an event like this because of the title, and they feel welcome. Men come too, but I'm just saying that it seems to really matter how you use the word. So yeah, have you noticed an increase in the number of female students in your program who may have been introduced to financial
planning through your course and suddenly became financial. well, eventually majored in financial planning, because we have this problem at the graduate level. At the undergraduate level, for a long time we were almost 50/50, which, well, I know, is unheard of in the financial planning field. But at the I look around and think, "Okay, just me." Okay, you know. And it varies from semester to semester, but I was wondering if it helped raise awareness for women who are like, "Oh, wait, no, I can do that," and then maybe get them into financial planning as a major. It's too early, Kimberly. Unfortunately, this is only the second semester that we've been teaching this course.
Okay. Yes, but I hope so. Thank you. Yes. Oh. Yes. I was wondering if Smith College funds faculty to teach non-credit courses, or is it more like volunteer work, or do you have to find outside funding to make these courses exist? It wasn't, it wasn't volunteer work, but we do have funding. We used, you know, a donation that was specifically for this program. Limited funding for WFI, so we could use it in any way we could to help get the courses to the students. And as long as we had students, we didn't had to, you know, explain why the faculty were paid so much. continue, continue the course
so that it didn't become a volunteer effort. funding, we, we proposed it. And I think what really changed was not just the name change that was an issue. But COVID really changed everything. Everything changed, and we're still working to get everything back to the way it was. I mean, all the retirements were during COVID. Do I have a question for Cecilia. Um, AI can help make the curriculum clear, but I don't think AI can increase the number of students in your course. You said that in just one or two semesters, the number of students went from 1,000 to 1,500. How did you promote your course on campus and achieve a 50% growth in one semester?
Thanks, Jim, for the question. So, the first year, we kept it at 1,000. The first semester last spring we had 1,000 as well. And, um, this fall there was so much interest in the course that after the 1,000 filled up in just 18 days, we opened a second group of 500. How did you. did you use any outreach programs on campus, or just. No, just for the initial launch, because, as you know, students are looking online, and a new four-credit course is a pretty big commitment. So we had a website, we reached out to all the academic advising offices on campus, to the major student organizations, we made connections, and so on, but after that first success, we did n't need to advertise anymore And now the AI had to review the curriculum for
Um, two questions for Cecilia. You mentioned that there were requests from the industry like, can you graduate more women? Um, so what's the deal? And related to So the question is, if you think about the CFP program, are there any lessons that you've learned that you think could be useful for the CFP program to attract more women? This type of accreditation? Ohio State University but nationally -to attract more women. Um, to take the CFP exam course and to start this career, because there's a huge need for women advisors in this field. Firms are definitely looking to hire women advisors, and with
students in the program being female, it's really hard to meet the demand that's out there in the industry. I feel like I didn't answer your question very well. Oh, it's more like, should I change the name to " Women in CFPA" or something? I don't know. I think there's a misconception about what financial advising is. It's really a relationship business. A helping business. First of all, it also requires a lot of psychology. And the perception is different. More It's like a Wall Street-style job, focused on investing. We're hoping that by having a lot of speakers for the Women and Money course, our financial planners, we can provide. yeah. A deep understanding
of the field Well, I actually wanted to ask about how you've attracted so many students. You mentioned that you have, did you have a website? Is it still up and running? Yeah. Because if so, I would encourage people to go there. I think it's really smart and innovative the way they've promoted this course. Quite aggressively with this great website. The instructor recorded a video explaining what the course is going to be about. A ton of information. Much more information than students would normally find about a course. They gave the students so much material so that they could really understand what it was going to be about.
They put all of this information in their They promoted this course in a way that I've never seen people promote courses like this at my university. And I thought that was very clever. Yeah. And it was very successful. So, we felt like we needed a website. We saw on Reddit that there were discussions like, "I need a four-credit civics course, which one should I take?" On Reddit? Like a student Reddit? Yeah. Sure. So there were comments like, "This new course called ' Women and Money,' does anyone know anything about it?" And so we started not only responding to these posts, but also.
Cool. You said it was a completely online asynchronous course. Is that very common at your university, or is it relatively rare for students? They're looking for that because of the flexibility, or. It's very common for the 2000 level. Ours is 3000, but yeah, for large introductory courses, you can't reach a large audience if it's offline. So they're large. The other course that we actually copied is Movement and Nutrition, a physical education and nutrition class, also asynchronous online. And that's the best way to reach a large audience. And that's great because it gives students flexibility, but all of our core courses are offline. So, only the general education introductory courses, where we
want to reach a wider audience, are often asynchronous online courses. Uh-huh. But not at the major level. Okay, we're almost out of time, but does. Cecilia. Now the onus is on you to help us increase the number of women in No, I'm serious, going back to his point. I think it would be great from a tracking perspective so that we can go to the CFP board and tell them these are different ways that we've been able to get women into this profession, because we're so needed in this profession. And that's certainly my hope for your course. And I'm like, I'll go back, we have a whole course called "Women in the Global Economy." And if there's no personal finance content, I'm pretty sure there is, but not to this extent, right? Then I'll be like, "Oh, we have a
new course," because I hope to be able to get women in that way. And also, um, the site that I made is so fantastic because when we.our students take the intro to personal finance course, not only do they go on Reddit, but the parents have Facebook groups where they communicate with each other. I'm like, my students tell me, "My mom I found you on Facebook." What am I doing this for? Oh, yeah, what. When you get. We started with just one or two sections of our introductory personal finance course each semester. When I was a grad student, it was around 2015-16. And now we're offering five or six courses each
semester, and we have almost 300 students. So it's like. once you put that work in at the beginning, then it goes great because everyone is communicating with each other, and our groups fill up almost immediately as soon as the courses open up. So yeah. But yeah, that's it. But thank you all so much. Yeah. Thank you so much, Minaz and Cecilia. Please give them a round of applause, and
