2023 Survey of Financial Wellness Programs in Higher Education

Abstract

The Higher Education Financial Wellness Alliance (HEFWA) is a network of professionals and institutions driven to advancing student success through financial wellness. The Higher Education Financial Wellness Alliance was created as a result of the success of the annual Higher Education Financial Wellness Summit (originally known as the National Summit on Collegiate Financial Wellness), which was first held in 2014. While the Summit has been a positive venue for bringing together financial wellness champions from around the country, there is now a clear demand for the opportunity to continue the conversations throughout the rest of the year. This is the reason for the Alliance: to be the premiere forum for conversations related to financial wellness in higher education.

In the summer and fall of 2023, the Higher Education Financial Wellness Alliance conducted a nation-wide survey to capture the landscape of financial wellness-related programming in colleges and universities across the United States. For the purposes of the survey, the term financial wellness refers to “a range of programs and resources that support college students’ overall financial health and aid students in making well informed financial decisions,” drawn from the HEFWA website (HEFWA, 2023, para. 5).

The survey was distributed through the Higher Education Financial Wellness Alliance listserv and distributed to several listservs and newsletters of associations and organizations serving higher education institutions. The survey was also conducted over a HEFWA webinar and live at the 2023 HEFWA Summit in Eugene, Oregon. The survey received 55 complete responses, up from 48 responses in 2022 (Taylor et al., 2022) but down sharply from 2020 when there were 157 complete responses (Schuman et al., 2020). Incomplete surveys were not counted as part of this report.