Clark Atlanta U. Invests in Financial Literacy—and Not Just for Students
By Beckie Supiano
Financial literacy has become a hot topic in higher education, with a growing number of colleges offering training to their students, especially on how to manage their loan debt. Clark Atlanta University, a historically black university in Atlanta, has carried the idea further by providing services to its faculty, staff, and alumni, as well.
The university's president, Carlton E. Brown, talked with The Chronicle about how the effort fits into Clark Atlanta's larger focus on teaching students to be entrepreneurial.
Q. What led you to pay so much attention to financial literacy?
A. One of the things that we think is critically important for our students is to really understand the power of finances and how best to position themselves with that power. We're pressing entrepreneurialism across the curriculum for the primary purpose of helping people understand that, regardless of their career path, they're going to have to make some moves to gain control over their accumulation of wealth and resources, and to begin to do so in as systematic a fashion as possible.
And by wealth we don't mean how big a salary you end up earning, we're talking about how you translate money into property, possessions, and financial power over time.
Q. What kind of resources and training are you offering to your students?
A. First of all, entrepreneurial training. Secondly, money management. Thirdly, investments, how one makes investments. And fourth, really multitasking their way through college—in the sense that one can work, earn money, ... reduce the overall cost of living while pursuing a college education—and then maximizing the benefit of what has been gained, through internships et cetera. In those ways you maximize your opportunities for employment as well as your options for graduate school.
You make sure that you understand just how much debt you are accumulating and your plans for paying it back, begin to prepare to think about homeownership—as opposed to accumulating the trappings of success—but really beginning to move to quality and safe investments. Planning families as opposed to just launching into whatever comes, relationships, the impact of premature pregnancy—all of those things have to be part of the preparation of the college student going forward.
Q. You're also making an effort to help your faculty, your staff, and alumni. What are you doing for those groups, and why?
A. We live in, for example, an area with a heavy number of foreclosed homes, and it would be folly to assume that our faculty are not impacted and our staff are not impacted by that. And so a big part of our service to them will be making sure that we connect them effectively with the counseling and the services that we know will help them "rightsize" their loans, help them maintain their fiscal integrity, help avoid bankruptcy, and in some cases refinance their homes and achieve a new level of financial comfort.
Q. It seems like a lot of this could also benefit the college in some ways. Was that part of your thinking?
A. Well, we like to think in a long-range fashion. The better our students, our faculty, our staff, and our alumni are equipped to manage their own finances, and the more the college may play a role in that, the greater the fond regard for the institution, the greater the likelihood of increasing the contributions back to the institution, which would be absolutely necessary to support the next generation of students. What we're trying to build is the kind of community that learns how to serve itself coming and going, and at every level of the enterprise.
Q. You're also starting a disaster-preparedness corps. How does that fit into the rest of what you're doing?
A. It really comes down to: What are the services that young people ought to be prepared to provide to others? So we want to build an even stronger corps than we have now of people who are prepared to help the elderly with their taxes, help people address their own poverty issues and how to gain access to services, which we do through our school of social work. But also, in terms of disaster preparedness and disaster response, through our center for environmental justice and our [Atlanta University Center] sustainability projects we have provided trained personnel, both our students and others, to do things like go to the Gulf and participate in the kind of cleanup that continues to be necessary there. What we want to develop is a very comprehensive corps of people that can be of service to others both from the immediate moment of disaster and then through the subsequent months and years after the newspapers and the cameras have gone away.
Q. African-Americans were particularly hard-hit during the recession. In light of that, does this kind of programming take on additional importance for you as the leader of an HBCU?
A. It really does. The loss of black wealth just since 2008 changes everything that institutions like mine can do and think about. So many of the families who were perpetual donors in support of this institution, in large and small ways, are no longer capable. So many families who used to pay significant parts of their students' bill at this private institution can no longer do that. And so the demand, the need for support, is so much stronger now. In spite of the fact that we've done well enough to almost double the amount of financial support we provide our students, the increase in need has outstripped even that.
Q. It's interesting when you talk about how this financial literacy piece meshes with your move to create entrepreneurial students. Thinking about that, it seems like a large part of financial literacy promotes kind of conservative behavior, trying to plan ahead for the future and not do anything too risky, while being entrepreneurial seems like you have to be a little bit risky. How does a student balance those messages as they create this adult life for themselves?
A. Well, several people have said this, but Bob Johnson, former head of BET, and Andy Young [the former mayor of Atlanta] say something over and over again that I think is critically important: In the times in which we live now, if you have never been an entrepreneur, you're going to find a need to be entrepreneurial. The jobs that have gone away are not jobs that are coming back, and so that means that we have to think about the growth of small businesses, the invention of new businesses, the organization of service sectors. People have to find new ways to earn a living and to be of service to each other and to their communities.
And that simply means that in addition to the obvious conserving element of financial literacy, one has to also understand what the risk factors are in trying to make money from meager resources. How do you develop a business plan, what risks are worth taking, what kinds of partners do you need, who will invest in enterprise and at what level, what sacrifices do you have to make to begin a new enterprise ... you know, all kinds of questions have to be addressed and people have to gain the skills to be able to do that alone and in concert with others.
