Special Report July 23, 2009, 12:01AM EST

Financial Literacy: Reaching the College Crowd

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Willis maintains that the financial world morphs too quickly for consumers to keep up, or for concepts learned in school to remain pertinent down the line. To her, financial education is a "waste of time and resources."

Could fresher, innovative methods created by students make a difference?

Emory: Goizueta Investors is born

Michael Becker spent weeks planning the first meeting of Emory Trade, his brainchild for a student-run investment group at Emory University. Armed with two bags of Doritos and some soda he and his co-founders provided, then-freshman Becker arrived at the inaugural meeting with extensive charts on economic indicators and risk-return tradeoffs, hoping to explain the importance of personal finance.

He and his fellow board members found a audience of five.

Undaunted, Becker negotiated a merger with Emory's other financial literacy group. He created an interactive website. He put flyers at every dorm door. He rebranded the new club Goizueta Investors as a jargon-free way for business and art history majors alike to learn personal finance.

"We'd always treat each meeting as if it was our first and last chance to retain members," says Becker, who now works at a major financial institution.

From the next meeting to this day, five years later, GI has been holding standing-room-only general meetings. It counts more than 460 current members. Following Becker's lead, successive presidents have treated GI more like a strong, innovative company than an easygoing student club, from spreadsheets detailing member activity to heavy advertising for every event.

Growth during financial crisis

As its programming evolved over the past few years—from textbook-based seminars to a four-part student-led series on beginning and advanced investing—GI has conducted such events as a face-to-face Q&A with Warren Buffett, seminars with Wall Street gurus, and roundtable discussions with Goizueta Business School faculty members.

Since the financial crisis began in 2007, GI has taken a more prominent role on Emory's campus: junior Shawn Shivalkar, the current president, recounts staying hours after general body meetings to answer members' questions about the markets. "They're increasingly turning to us because we're focused on students' needs," he says.

Jon Turk, president of the Government of the Student Body (GSB) at Iowa State, is witnessing the same phenomenon. From lobbying the statehouse to having ad campaigns to raise awareness, Turk's constant advocacy efforts about high average student debt in Iowa are spurring other Hawkeyes to do the same. Last spring, when Turk proposed the creation of a mandatory one-credit course on personal finance, school officials dismissed the idea as an insufficiently rigorous academic endeavor.

Turk then appealed to students and won the GSB's unanimous approval for the plan's funding. "Now we are using student activity fee money to fund an academic course," Turk says. "That's how great we felt the need is."

The course is just a start, he says, but it will be interactive and fun, and there's already high demand for it. About the faculty's disapproval, Turk retorts: "Do I think a one-credit online course will change our state? No. But I figure if five or six students know the difference between a fixed- or variable-interest loan, then we've done some good."

Ramachandran is an intern in the Atlanta bureau of BusinessWeek.