Background:
The University of California, Santa Cruz offers a personal finance course through Cowell College in an effort to help students make informed and educated personal finance decisions throughout their lives. The course, Personal Finance and Investing (COWL 52), is a 5-unit, online, asynchronous class that engages over 1,000 students from throughout the multicampus UC system during the academic year, with another 500 students enrolling in summer session offerings. The course covers vital financial responsibilities we all face throughout our adult lives, including compensation, taxes, budgeting, savings, credit, and insurance. It includes real-time stock market investing and culminates in students creating an investment strategy for a retirement portfolio. Students are given conceptual principles, but emphasis is on practical tools and problem-solving.
The course was developed and is taught by Patricia Kelly, who brings extensive corporate finance and investment management experience, including working with individual clients, to this important educational effort. Over several years of teaching the class, she has continually updated and refined the curriculum, based on her experience interacting with many hundreds of students.
To solidify and extend the value of her curricular and pedagogical efforts, Ms Kelly is leading a new Financial Literacy Initiative offered by the Center for Analytical Finance (CAFIN). She has already built collaborations with the SlugCents Financial Wellness Program at UCSC, and the UC Investment Academy, a UC systemwide project of UC Investments, the university’s investment arm. This project aims to prepare student participants for careers in the financial industry.
Initiative Goals:
CAFIN-FLI will measure and document the impacts of the personal finance course developed by Patricia Kelly. This will improve our understanding of how such efforts can make a difference in students’ lives, as well as providing feedback for continued refinements of the curriculum and pedagogy. Drawing inspiration from Professor Annamaria Lusardi’s pathbreaking research on financial literacy education, CAFIN brings together a range of expertise and professional experience in finance, economics, accounting, experimental methods, and data analytics. By integrating theory and data, CAFIN has the ability to provide evidence-based insights and practical solutions to improve financial decision-making and literacy.
Broadly, the kinds of questions that CAFIN-FLI will be tackling include how students who have taken the personal finance class perform in their subsequent time in the university, and possibly beyond graduation. Aspects of performance include degree completion, grades in related courses in economics and finance, and the nature of financial decision-making itself, including patterns of budgeting, saving and borrowing; the use of various software tools (apps) for financial management and planning; and comprehension of financial concepts such as net worth, loan terms, credit scores, and loan repayment strategies. More broadly, we will also investigate if, and in what manner, taking the class leads students to develop and refine their personal financial goals.
The planned research effort will entail documenting the baseline understanding and behavior with respect to personal finance of students taking the class. Given the large number of students taking the class, this baseline data itself will be useful in understanding student knowledge of personal finance, and the behavioral routines and technology choices that they have adopted on their own. In keeping with UC’s mission as a public university, we will also seek to understand differences related to socio- economic background and other demographic characteristics, as well as how the impacts of the taking the class are related to those characteristics. This aspect of the research may help design features of the curriculum to reduce initial inequalities in financial literacy stemming from unequal life experiences or financial opportunities prior to entering university.
Who We Are:
Patricia Kelly is a lecturer at UC Santa Cruz who teaches Cowell 52: Personal Finance and Investing. She is a Key Partner in Financial Literacy and serves on the Advisory Board for the UC Investment Academy at the UC Office of the President. Patricia’s background includes a career in investment management and corporate finance. She holds a B.A. in Economics from UC Santa Cruz and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Kevin Jones holds a Doctorate in Business Administration (Accounting) from J Mack Robinson School of Business and an MBA from the University of Baltimore. He is a CGMA, CMA, and CPA. Currently, an Associate Professor of Teaching at UC Santa Cruz, he teaches various accounting courses. Kevin joined UCSC in 2016 after serving as an Assistant Clinical Professor at Drexel University. Before academia, he was Global Operational Controller at GE and held positions at Yum! Brands, Georgia Pacific Corporation, and Phillip Morris.
Kai Pommerenke is a continuing lecturer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, teaching both undergraduate and graduate finance courses. He holds a CFA charter and a Ph.D. in economics. Before joining UCSC, Kai was a management consultant for financial institutions with Booz & Co., founded an EdTech startup, and worked for a large European FinTech company.
Natalia Lazzati is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at UC Santa Cruz. She is also an Associate Editor of the Journal of Mathematical Economics. As a microeconomic theorist, Natalia focuses on integrating theory and data, with much of her research centered around games of strategic complements, also known as supermodular games. Currently, she is developing an education hub platform to support an active learning-by-doing approach.
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