At Metropolitan Community College (MCC), Sabrina Osborn
has reached students
directly
with financial education through student loan entrance counseling. However, she
has worked to expand MCC’s financial literacy offerings beyond her department
of Student Financial Services. Thanks to her efforts, MCC now includes
financial education in their first year seminar and has ten peer mentors
coordinating outreach throughout their five campuses. Osborn’s financial
literacy work has been centered on flexibility and meeting students where they
are at.
When the First Year Experience seminar was created at
MCC, financial literacy was identified as a focus area. To cover this,
instructors relied on a PowerPoint presentation that was shared each semester,
but many did not feel comfortable teaching the topic because they did not have
formal personal finance training. Osborn saw CashCourse as a solution to this
issue and worked as an interdepartmental advocate to get the program included.
Osborn says, “When we started using CashCourse, I was
excited since (our First Year Experience) instructors could just assign
activities and it does the teaching.”
Instructors now use CashCourse coursework modules in
conjunction with their first year seminar to help engage students with personal
finance. This inclusion helped MCC to be one of the CashCourse top five schools
for web engagement in May 2019.
Osborn has also focused on student outreach and has been
able to increase her capacity considerably thanks to the recent addition of
peer mentors. The Missouri Department of Education offered a pilot program that
helped fund 10 peer mentors at MCC. The school paid the students and the state
reimbursed their department for their wages.
In addition to providing financial support, the state
also helped train these students. The state department taught sessions to the
students on academic, financial and personal success. They covered the general
information students would need to know as a peer mentor, and MCC staff
provided their school-specific trainings.
Osborn has reiterated that peer mentors have made an
impact with their work.
“It's been so helpful to see what they see. They can tap
into their network and wave people down. These are student leaders who know
lots of people and are able to invite them to interact. I've been really
impressed with my peer mentors this first term,” says Osborn.
Osborn was able to identify potential peer mentors by
asking departments to recommend student leaders. They ended up placing three of
these mentors at the main campus and two at each of the other campuses. Osborn
says they have had to be flexible in their efforts.
She says, “We thought we would have a lot of appointments
and have a lot of one-on-one time, but this term was a lot of just doing
outreach. We did a lot of outreach tables with the peer mentors to let students
know these resources are available to them.”
They have specifically found great success with a
table-top Plinko game at information tables. Students get to drop a disc for
every financial literacy question they get right. This also gives the peer
mentors the opportunity to refer students to CashCourse.
“Tables in the cafeteria have been a great strategy for
us. I used some of the questions from CashCourse courses and quizzes to create
the trivia games. Students would be like, ‘Wow, I didn't know that!’ and then
we would refer them CashCourse,” explains Osborn
These informal meetings have been a big focus for MCC
after struggling to get students to attend in-person workshops. The peer
mentors have helped expand the reach and have allowed the department to tap
into those existing social networks. Osborn says it has been a lot of trial and
error to figure out what works for her campuses. She emphasizes patience with
cultivating a program.
She says, “Stick with it. Don't get frustrated. Try
something different if you feel like throwing in the towel. If you think
something really can work, your instincts are probably right. Be patient even
if it's slow to start.”
August 2019