To play the Game of Life, an annual student-life activity at the University of North Texas, students start with a scorecard listing a salary, based on their chosen career. Then they stop at a series of tables, hosted by the Student Health and Wellness Center, the financial-aid office, the Career Center, and other campus offices and programs. At every table, they get a card with a life event: Congrats, you got a raise at work! Or — oh no, you’ve been in a fender bender. That’ll cost you.
Lately, the Game of Life has featured a table from Wells Fargo. The bank pays for the university’s entire Money Month of activities designed to teach students how to budget, save, make it through college, and eventually afford big-ticket items, such as a car or home.
“The formula for college success today only has two elements,” said Paul F. Goebel, director of North Texas’ Student Money Management Center: “Grades and money.” Goebel sees it as his mission to keep students from dropping out because of the latter.
The vast majority of North Texas’ financial-literacy programming for students is supported by the university, Goebel said, but his office seeks out sponsors for what it considers extras, such as Money Month. At the Wells Fargo table, students have the option to buy different cars, and they get a handout telling them what their monthly payments and interest would be if they financed the purchase with a Wells Fargo loan.
Partnerships like this feature an inherent conflict. In accepting bank sponsorships, colleges and universities give those companies access to their impressionable students — future customers. What guardrails should institutions place on those arrangements? (The Student Money Management Center avoids recommending specific financial institutions to students, said Rachel Graviett, a former assistant director of the center.)
It’s not clear how common it is for universities to fund such financial-literacy efforts with bank partnerships. To get a sense of the field, The Chronicle gathered details on a sample of a dozen bank-supported programs, including those at community colleges, four-year universities, and public and private institutions. Administrators running the programs hold a variety of philosophies, and it appears the field is only beginning to tackle its dilemmas.
Bank-sponsored financial literacy appears at the nexus of two trends. One is a decade-long push for more and better financial-awareness education for students. Just this year, a professional organization formed for staff members in colleges’ financial-literacy offices, the Higher Education Financial Wellness Alliance. Some alliance members had been holding an annual conference since 2014, but they decided to create a formal organization after seeing attendance double.
The other trend is corporations’ campaigns to reach college students in new and deeper ways, as an antidote to young adults’ increasing skepticism about traditional marketing. Banks have long offered students university-branded credit cards and checking accounts. Sponsoring financial-literacy programming is another way to put their names in front of students.
What Does Bank-Sponsored Financial Literacy Look Like?
Among the examples The Chronicle analyzed, the extent to which banking sponsors supported the financial-literacy office varied. In some cases, banks funded major services, while in others, banks might only bolster individual programs or events. Frequently, banks would send employees onto campuses to give talks with company-provided slides and handouts.
Within sponsored programs, the pushiness of the sales pitch also varied.
At the University of Oklahoma, the MoneyCoach program offers students one-on-one appointments with a full-time financial adviser who helps them create personalized plans to pay for college. MoneyCoach is partly funded by Oklahoma-based MidFirst Bank, whose name is incorporated into the MoneyCoach logo, and so shows up on the office sign, fliers advertising services and events, and the email signature of the program’s leader, Michael Hinderman.
During MoneyCoach sessions, however, coaches don’t recommend particular companies. “We always just say, ‘Make sure to research, and here’s things to look for when you research,’” Hinderman said. “We don’t want to be giving too much advice because that plays into values too much, and we want them to make choices based on their individual values.”
The University of Nebraska at Omaha’s College of Business Administration teams up with Wells Fargo to put on free financial seminars for community members and students. “Professors are encouraged to bring their classes and offer extra credit,” the program’s website reads. A slide presentation for one recent seminar, about types of credit, not only was branded but also suggested specific Wells Fargo loans to help pay for college and to consolidate multiple loans.
Nevertheless, John P. Rasmussen, head of personal lending at Wells Fargo, said that selling products to students is not the goal. “That’s not what our arrangement is with the school,” he said. “It’s around providing financial education and resources that are widely needed by college students, and we have been asked by universities to do it for them.”
At the University of California at Berkeley, administrators kept one bank-funded program unbranded, but a subtle sales pitch ended up in another. Bank of the West covers most of the operating costs for Bears for Financial Success, Berkeley’s peer-to-peer financial-counseling program, but it agreed to keep the program logo-free, said Claudia Villicaña, the university’s financial-wellness and outreach manager.
But Bank of the West is also the corporate sponsor of the annual, student-run Financial Literacy and Economic Justice Conference. Last year a Bank of the West branch manager led a conference session about basic budgeting. His slides included three bullet points advising attendees to open accounts with local banks with many campus ATMs, to avoid ATM fees levied by banks on other companies’ customers.
Of course, because of a 10-year agreement the bank signed with Berkeley in 2015, the only ATMs on the campus are Bank of the West’s. Its media-relations office didn’t respond to an email and a call seeking comment.
Some sponsorship contracts suggest that banks view universities’ financial-literacy programs with more of a commercial than an educational eye. Financial seminars are listed under “marketing rights” or “marketing opportunities” in Bowling Green State University’s and Georgetown University’s agreements with PNC Bank, and Ohio State University’s paperwork with the Huntington National Bank, which were posted in a public federal database. Only Bowling Green State’s contract reciprocally framed “educational programs geared towards developing student financial awareness” as a commitment that the bank made to the university.
In an email, Jason Beyersdorfer, a spokesman for PNC, said the sponsorship is an “opportunity to educate students and parents about personal banking and money management, which is a mutually valuable benefit.” Emily Smith, a spokeswoman for Huntington, said the bank views financial literacy as community service, and pointed out that its teaching materials don’t mention specific products. But they are branded.
Not all bank-funded programs seemed to require branding in return. Last year Durham Technical Community College, in North Carolina, received a $100,000 grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation to expand financial-coaching efforts on its campus. Slide presentations that Laurence Chapman, the campus’s financial coach, sent to The Chronicle were not branded by the foundation at all, and suggested audience members contact Chapman for more information — not the bank. That’s in contrast to nearly every other slide deck from bank-funded programs that The Chronicle reviewed.
How Much Branding Is OK?
Several administrators in financial-literacy offices said that sponsorship is acceptable as long as the sponsor doesn’t see such programs as an opportunity to sell products. But what exactly “an opportunity to sell products” means depends on whom you ask.
Lisa D. Inman, dean of student support at Durham Tech, said she did not object to sponsors’ logos on the program’s fliers, or to bank representatives’ mentioning their accounts and loans during seminars, as long as they also said competitors offered similar products.
Karen Serna was more skeptical. Serna is director of the Student Money Management Office at Austin Community College, in Texas, and part of the leadership team for the new Higher Education Financial Wellness Alliance.
“No, I don’t want somebody coming in their bank gear presenting their — as they say — unbiased financial-literacy curriculum,” she said. She doesn’t think administrators should invite bank representatives to the campus unless they’ve determined the bank’s products are “fair and appropriate for students.”
I don’t want somebody coming in their bank gear presenting their — as they say — unbiased financial-literacy curriculum.
“Most institutions just don’t have the capacity to do all that screening,” she said.
Austin Community College does work with the University Federal Credit Union to offer the Rainy Day Savings Program, in which students open a free savings account at the credit union and strive to save $500 for the kinds of setbacks, such as a car breakdown or an unexpected doctor’s bill, that might otherwise threaten their ability to pay tuition. The credit union funds the program’s incentives, which give students up to $100 each to reward them for taking steps such as filling out their federal student-aid form or setting up a direct deposit into the Rainy Day account.
“I understand we are promoting a specific credit union,” Serna said. As of November 2019, Austin students had saved a total of $56,000 in their University Federal Credit Union Rainy Day pots. “You can’t run this program without promoting,” Serna said. “You need somebody to physically hold the bank account.” She felt she understood the products the credit union offered, and was comfortable recommending them to students.
Asked whether the Higher Education Financial Wellness Alliance had discussed guidelines for corporate partnerships, she said there had been a little conversation, but the situation is difficult: Wells Fargo sponsored a part of the 2019 Higher Education Financial Wellness Summit.
