Sometimes learning about personal finance brings immediate rewards beyond the long-term payback from properly planning a monthly budget.
Rebecca Heath ’11 received an Apple iPad 2 as winner of a drawing for participants of CashCourse, an online course in partnership between Unity College and the National Endowment for Financial Education (NEFE). The course helps boost the financial literacy of college students. She is a Marine Biology major from Rochester, New York.
Photo is Heath (Center), Director of Financial Aid Rand Newell, and Financial Aid Office Assistant Barbara Adams.
Prior to the drawing for the iPad, Heath and other participants in CashCourse pursued a financial literacy boosting scavenger hunt. Topics covered included budgeting, understanding financial aid, credit and debt, money management, and preventing identity theft.
NEFE is an independent nonprofit foundation committed to educating Americans on a broad range of financial topics and empowering them to make positive and sound decisions to reach their financial goals. Financial literacy is an essential life skill for the 21st century and is especially important for college students who, on campus and in real life, will have more financial choices and opportunities than any previous generation. Funds for the iPad 2 were provided through a grant from NEFE.
“The importance of providing financial literacy education has never been more important, especially for college students who find themselves making significant long term financial decisions to finance their education,” noted Rand Newell, Director of Financial Aid at Unity College. “We have been partnering with The National Endowment for Financial Education (NEFE) for a number of years to provide our students access to a wealth of valuable information to help them learn about financial basics and providing them with tools such as budget worksheets, interest cost calculators, and a variety of other resources to make positive and sound decisions to reach their financial goals.”
“We have been annually presenting this information to our incoming students in their student success classes, and this Scavenger Hunt was another successful tool to raise the financial awareness of our students,” he added.
Unity College is a small private college in rural Maine that provides dedicated, engaged students with a liberal arts education which emphasizes the environment and natural resources. Unity College graduates are prepared to be environmental stewards, effective leaders, and responsible citizens through active learning experiences within a supportive community.
In 2011, Unity College was named to the top 30 of the Washington Monthly college rankings, and was one of eighteen U.S. colleges and universities named to The Princeton Review’s 2010 Green Rating Honor Roll.
