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.

To meet the increasing demands for more STEM graduates, United States (U.S.) higher education institutions need to support the retention of minoritized populations, such as first-generation Latinas studying engineering. The theories influencing this study included critical race theory, the theory of validation, and community cultural wealth. Current advising practices, when viewed through a critical race theory lens, reinforce deficit viewpoints about students and reinforce color-blind ideologies. As such, current practices will fail to support first-generation Latina student persistence in engineering. A 10-week long study was conducted on validating advising practices. The advisors for the study were purposefully selected while the students were selected via a stratified sampling approach. Validating advising practices were designed to elicit student stories and explored the ways in which advisors validated or invalidated the students. Qualitative data were collected from interviews and reflections. Thematic analysis was conducted to study the influence of the validating advising practices. Results indicate each advisor acted as a different type of validating “agent” executing her practices described along a continuum of validating to invalidating practices. The students described their advisors’ practices along a continuum of prescriptive to developmental to transformational advising. While advisors began the study expressing deficit viewpoints of first-generation Latinas, the students shared multiple forms of navigational, social, aspirational, and informational capital. Those advisors who employed developmental and transformational practices recognized and drew upon those assets during their deployment of validating advising practices, thus leading to validation within the advising interactions.