University of Arizona Coursework
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, INDV 102. Additional 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.
INDV 102—Money, Consumers and the Family. This course describes the prominent characteristics of consumption behavior, societal change that has influenced consumer-driven societies and pressures for change in the future. The course will examine the important economic variables that have led to rapidly growing consumer demand for goods and services as well as increased debt, overspending and an inability to achieve long term personal financial goals. An objective analysis of both personal and global consumption habits will provide the transition into sustainable strategies to increase personal financial solvency. The course will not provide you with the answers to achieving your personal financial goals, but rather will examine our consumer society and expose you to the major reasons why people spend and save. The aim of the course is to provide you with sufficient information to make judgments for yourself about your consumption patterns and long-term financial health.
- Offered on-line and in-person fall, spring, winter, pre-summer, summer I, and summer II
FCS 302 - Family and Consumer Personal Finance. This course focuses on a deeper discussion of personal finance, with an emphasis on real estate and housing decisions, investing, student loans, budgeting and more
- Offered on-line
RCSC 496 - Retail Financial Services. This course will introduce the retail financial services industry and the unique challenges associated with marketing intangible services to consumers. The primary focus is on the institutions and markets that provide retail credit (e.g., consumer loans, auto loans, credit cards, mortgages) and other banking services, with some occasional examples from the insurance and investment/retirement products sectors. We will explore the development and execution of customer-relationship-management (CRM) strategies by financial firms, including new account acquisition strategies, target-marketing tools and cross-selling. Because lending and banking activities have been the focus of extra regulatory scrutiny for centuries, the second half of the course will focus on a series of policy issues related to improving consumer access to credit and other banking services. We will discuss the regulatory constraints and reputation risk that profoundly affect marketing in the financial services industry. We will emphasize the ethical challenges unique to financial services marketing, including appropriate uses (and potential misuse) of abundant personal financial data, and marketing practices that could be viewed as “predatory” in exploiting uninformed or inexperienced customers. Occasional guest lectures from executives at leading financial services firms will reinforce all of these points.
- Offered in the spring semester
RCSC 496z—Family Economics & Financial Education. This course is available to educators who are attending the FEFE National training. Individuals may choose to sign up to receive one, two, or three credits. To help them prepare for the training, they are required to read research articles about personal finance topics along with a book for the three credit option. At the training they must be active participants in all sessions. Then, to summarize what was learned at the training, provide educators with the opportunity to analyze the FEFE curriculum, and determine how they would best modify it to meet the needs of their classroom, educators write a detailed day-by-day plan for using the curriculum in their classroom.
- Offered summer 1 in conjunction with the FEFE national conference. Learn more at the FEFE website.
