Personal financial wellness is becoming a point of emphasis on college campuses across the country. We’ve seen firsthand the hard work that college staff and administrators are putting into this effort on behalf of our students.
Arbol is based on what we’ve learned from people on the front lines of this conversation, and our scalable software solution enables colleges to achieve their goals. Our tools can be delivered to hundreds or thousands of students at a time by creating personalized financial plans that allow colleges to efficiently deliver the right resources to the right student at the right time.
In a previous blog, we shared our thoughts on what a successful program looks like. But how to get there? Where to start? We’re pleased to explore how change can be implemented.
* Start with students that have a balance
Students that have an outstanding balance have a problem (which can be minor or massive, depending on the balance), and an incentive to take action. These lists also foreshadow future dropouts, as they reveal which students are facing severe financial pressure.
We suggest taking a segment of them and introducing some form of planning, counseling and resources to cover their balance but also to look at the underlying reason it exists in the first place.
At Arbol, this exercise has taken the form of personalized financial plans through our app, creating a holistic understanding of their income and expenses. Colleges on our platform are then able to deliver small grants to students that showed they were on the path toward financial viability.
* Tie it to aid
This is another suggestion that centers around students who have a shared incentive with the college to participate in financial wellness. Needs-based aid is an investment in a student, and tying it to financial wellness is a way to de-risk that investment.
Most of Arbol’s initial customers have introduced the platform through specific programs before spreading adoption more widely in the student body. This is not an Arbol-specific suggestion though. By creating financial wellness planning at the programmatic level, it is a proving ground to the rest of campus about the value of financial wellness in strategic and financial terms.
* Dedicated staff
Colleges for years have been ticking off the financial wellness box by implementing third-party tools that serve as passive education modules that emphasize long-term planning and saving. It resembles household wealth planning – a valid exercise but not what college students need when their primary investment is their time in education.
To create momentum and a sense of purpose, colleges need to create new roles for staff members to own the implementation and adoption of financial wellness, and to take responsibility for its success.
* Selling it internally
Financial wellness is a subject that spans many traditional on-campus silos, and it requires authentic buy-in starting with executives, through financial aid and student affairs and then the people running the programs through which it will be delivered. Once a college has dedicated staff members, they must build a consensus around its strategic importance. This is easy to say and hard to do, but when there are non-believers in the financial wellness spectrum, they can easily hinder the success of a program that would otherwise be successful.
We love talking about this stuff! If you’d like more information, please reach out to David Gonzalez at david@growarbol.com or visit our website. And stay tuned for part two of this series, which will focus on how to implement a financial wellness plan at your college.
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About us: Arbol was founded in 2021 by David Gonzalez and Favio Osorio, based on their experiences as first-generation college students. David and Favio went on to successful careers in finance and startups before they started Arbol to address the dropout problem in higher ed. Arbol’s software platform creates personalized financial plans for students from the moment they step on campus, and makes it easy for colleges to track those students and ensure their progress.
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