Educational Outreach:The TCAI has developed an array of financial education outreach programs. Each academic year, hundreds of University of Arizona students take a 3-credit elective course developed by the Institute that focuses on the intersection of personal finance and American culture. Two other university courses developed through the Institute offer deeper exposure to personal finance topics as well as an introduction to the functioning of the retail financial services industry. The Institute’s “Credit-Wise Cats” program recruits and trains university students to be financial education ambassadors who present dozens of financial education seminars each semester on campus and in high schools and middle schools across the greater Tucson community. To complement the outreach to local schools, each year the Institute organizes and hosts a personal finance case study competition that brings several hundred of high school and middle school students to campus to analyze true-to-life cases of household financial distress and compete to offer the best solutions. In terms of sheer numbers of students reached, the Institute’s Family Economics and Financial Education (FEFE) project has the broadest impact. The FEFE program develops and continually updates a financial education curriculum for high school students. Provided free of charge by the Institute, the curriculum is being used by more than 12,000 teachers nationwide and reached several hundred thousand students during 2007. To support and enhance its outreach programs the Institute works with scholars from the UA and other research universities, drawing from a wide variety of academic disciplines including behavioral finance and economics, psychology, sociology, consumer sciences and family studies. This interdisciplinary approach is expanding the research agenda to generate insights regarding consumer financial decisions. These insights guide the development of the Institute’s financial education workshops, curriculum and delivery methods. In addition, the Institute’s research agenda includes studies of the impact of existing financial education programs across the country to measure program effectiveness, including measures of subsequent change in behavior.
