Intervention(s)
Financial literacy is an important life skill, which is often found wanting even among the adult population (Lusardi and Mitchell, 2014). However, there is significantly less studies concerning tertiary education settings, even though students often start their financially independent lives at the university, and therefore financial education becomes timely.
In this study, we seek to fill this gap by a new freshman course of financial literacy education tailored to the first-year students of the University of Vaasa. The aim of this course is to improve the financial management skills of the university students so that they would be able to conduct independent financial lives. The course was offered as an online course. The students are required to complete several tasks utilizing digital tools and online games, write short reports, and fill in questionnaires based on those tasks. Half of the freshman students are randomly selected to attend the financial education course (treatment group) and the other half attend a course on student’s democratic participation (control group) at the university.