2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

It is nothing new that young people often lack knowledge or experience with the basics of financial literacy and management. Students today are faced with rising costs for housing, health care, student loans, and rising interest rates. While those in engineering receive higher than average starting salaries, these rarely come with defined benefit pension plans, but rather rely on employees to navigate various investment plans for their retirement. At our school, civil engineering students take a senior seminar course that has a collection of topics to prepare them for successful entry into and growth throughout their professional life. Among the topics in our initial offering of this seminar course was one seminar on the basics of financial literacy and management, which proved to be very popular and highly rated as to its perceived usefulness by the students. As a result of student feedback, the seminar was expanded to two seminar periods. This led the author to ask the questions: (1) is there a need for financial literacy education among engineering students, including civil engineering students? and; (2) can financial literacy in civil engineering students be increased through a limited series of seminars? Can providing basic information on this topic make the students more comfortable about managing their future finances and securing a retirement that would meet their future needs? This paper will provide an overview of the literature on the need for financial literacy, present a summary of the topics covered in the seminars, and provide an assessment of the effectiveness of the seminars through survey data. A survey was developed and administered as a pre-lesson gauge of comfort with managing basic finances and as a check on basic financial knowledge. This tool was not only completed by students taking the seminar course, but also by over 150 students in other engineering disciplines and computer science to get a boarder baseline of existing knowledge. A post-seminar survey, done at the end of the semester (not immediately after the seminars on financial literacy) was given to gauge the success of these seminars on students’ comfort with and knowledge of basic financial knowledge required to manage their finances. With our students increasingly receiving ever higher salary offers and yet being expected to manage their future finances and invest for retirement with little formal education or knowledge, providing even minimal information seems like the right thing to do to help our students bridge the gap between being a student and a responsible working professional.