Conference Sessions
How to Engage Students in Financial Education Regardless of Your Role in Higher Education
Financial education is severely lacking for students in our society, but we as professionals don’t always feel empowered to integrate more financial education into our student interactions for a variety of reasons. In this interactive session, we’ll talk about the importance and impact of financial education on students, and then we’ll share the ways that we’re addressing it in our own spaces so that we can learn from each other, collaborate, and take new ideas back to our respective work environments. We will also consider our own financial education and what gaps we may still need to address, as well as share resources for building that education.
Presenter
Michelle Onaka
(she/her)
Michelle Onaka, M.S., is an Academic Counselor for TRIO SSS at Oregon State University, as well as the founder of Intentional Money Life LLC. She has taken an interest in supporting underrepresented students since 2012, from serving as an AmeriCorps volunteer helping marginalized high school seniors get to college, to completing a thesis on the correlation between Ethnic Studies course completion and graduation rates of students of color, and supporting first-gen and Pell-eligible college students in TRIO SSS. She especially likes talking about money, because quality financial education can help ameliorate the impact of systems of oppression at the individual level, and because that information can be life-changing. Outside of her two jobs, she enjoys hiking, traveling, listening to podcasts, being in water, and spending time with her partner and two young children.