Early College Cost Financial Coaching: An Intervention to Reduce Financial Barriers for Low-Income First-Year Students

Financial literacy is an area of knowledge with which many Americans struggle. For students transitioning from a free public K-12 system to a pay-to-attend system in higher education, understanding the actual cost of college becomes vital so they can persist to graduation. This study focused on low-income, campus-housed first-year students in the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence at Arizona State University. Incoming students were provided with early college financial coaching during the summer prior to their fall semester to investigate how the program might affect participants’ college cost financial literacy, the level of outstanding balances, and intent to register for the spring semester post-intervention. The students participated in Smart Start, an early college cost financial coaching program. The program included three one-on-one coaching sessions encompassing an in-depth overview of mandatory and flexible college costs, setting and updating a college budget, and constructing financial SMART goals. In this mixed methods study, participants took a pre-and post-survey and participated in a culminating interview. The study results demonstrated an improvement in college cost financial literacy, inconclusive results regarding participant balances owed to the university at the beginning of the fall, and no immediate impact on how students describe their intent to persist.