Financial planning programs need champions

If you talk to professors at some of the nation’s top financial planning degree programs, you’ll find they all have a similar problem: They can’t produce enough students to meet demand for them from the industry.

This is a great problem to have, but it underscores the dramatic growth of the financial planning industry as a whole and the fact that universities haven’t reacted fast enough to meet this increased demand. The number of CFP Board-registered degree programs continues to grow each year, but even with that growth, there is a shortage of talent coming out of these programs. There are a number of reasons for this, but I am going to focus on a few I have firsthand experience solving.

I have served as the program director for two of the largest financial planning degree programs at business schools accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business. I helped start the program at William Paterson University in 2008, and now I help run the program at Utah Valley University, which was started in 2009. Both of these programs now have well over 100 currently enrolled financial planning students and have tremendous records for job placement in the industry, though neither one existed a decade ago.

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THE RIGHT INGREDIENTS

Bringing awareness of the financial planning profession to college campuses requires a combination of these ingredients:

1. University administrators who genuinely care about helping place students in good jobs in a great industry.

2. A champion to help run the program on a daily basis. This generally should be a tenure-track professor with a financial planning doctorate, but it has been done successfully at a number of campuses with local practitioners acting as adjunct instructors who are highly committed and motivated to this cause despite not being highly compensated for doing it.

3. A missionary spirit. Even if a local university starts a financial planning degree program, it still has to overcome the obstacle of ignorance. Most students are unaware this career path exists.

We literally spend time every week in the hallways speaking to students on their way to/from classes, letting them know what a financial planner is and how they can join the major if they’re interested. The good news is that this is a very easy profession to recruit to. Our usual sales pitch involves explaining how this is one of the few careers in which you can help people and earn a good living.

4. We have found that you also need a steady stream of professionals from the industry coming to campus to speak to your students about what they do, how they help clients and what they’re looking for in potential hires. As local financial advisers come to campus and talk about how much they love their jobs (and list the reasons why), students really start to catch on to what it means to be in this profession — and they also start building their network of mentors they can seek advice from as they try to enter the industry.

There are a lot of other ingredients, but these four seem to be at the core of truly increasing awareness about financial planning on college campuses.

Financial advisers don’t realize the power they have to create awareness of the profession at their local college campuses. University administrators listen to professionals and alumni, and they care more about job placement after the financial crisis than they did before. Request a meeting with local university administrators to let them know about the career and of your firm’s desire to hire graduates who are trained and prepared to obtain the right certifications.

A GATEWAY CLASS

Volunteer to help teach classes on financial literacy to incoming freshmen. This class helps ensure those students don’t get into severe financial problems that cause them to drop out and not finish school, and it becomes a great gateway to the profession for students who are really drawn to that class.

While there is a lot of work that needs to be done on a daily basis to build a successful financial planning degree program, it can’t be overstated that industry professionals are the lifeblood of the program. If they don’t talk to administrators, it won’t get started. If they don’t come in and talk to students, it won’t get the traction it needs to take off.

We appreciate the great quantity and quality of professionals who have gone out of their way to come mentor, speak with, do mock interviews with, do resume reviews for and hire our students as interns or employees. The growth of the financial planning degree programs is a great example of what can happen when these four essential ingredients are combined and augmented by a steady stream of generous help from professionals in the industry.

Luke Dean is the financial planning program director in the Woodbury School of Business at Utah Valley University.