April is Financial Literacy Month, but for college students, money is top of mind all year round. A national survey shows that almost 80% of students are experiencing a negative impact on their mental health because of financial stress. Those concerns lead 59% of them to consider dropping out of school.
This underscores the importance of normalizing and modernizing conversations around money and credit. Experian is proud to lead the way through partnerships with HomeFree-USA’s Center for Financial Advancement®. In addition to creating the Credit Academy for college students, we hold the #IYKYK Pitch Competition (If You Know You Know), which gives students the opportunity to earn scholarships and address how to share their knowledge with their peers and communities.
We asked some recent #IYKYK Pitch Competition scholars what they found to be the most surprising as they’re learning about credit and finances:
Remi Ore, Fisk University
Forty-two percent of people are credit invisible in the U.S. and that’s interesting. Credit actually shapes their life and their future. They’re expected to build a future on top of a system like this, and yet they’re invisible to that system. How are they supposed to move forward from there? How are they supposed to get mortgages, own homes, get good jobs, and impact the community as well? That is one thing that was very surprising to me going through this journey.
Sovit Lekhak, Fisk University
Growing up I had a rough patch in my childhood where my family struggled with gambling addiction and financial problems. So, I was always scared of getting credit. I was scared of loans, and I was scared of paying them back. When I took Experian’s Credit Academy, I realized that getting credit is not always bad and it’s actually even necessary just to build up that profile, and that reference for the future. I think that mindset switch has opened a whole new world to me.
Ayo Oyeniyi, Talladega College
It was surprising to hear that when you’re done with a credit card, you don’t have to destroy it. You shouldn’t do that. That was shocking because typically when you’re done with stuff, you throw it away. But that was surprising that you have to keep it, because destroying it would affect your credit mix. That would affect your credit score.
Izu Mba, Talladega College
The fact that essentially credit is good. Growing up, owing money was not good in any form. So that whole idea of being able to owe to own is such a beautiful concept for me that I learned.
Lakayla Chapman, Bowie State University
One thing that learned and found surprising was that credit is not always a bad thing. Growing up, my mom has been really in my ear about credit. The way she came at it was that credit is a bad thing, ‘Don’t get loans, don’t do this, don’t do that.’ But I’m taking in the information that credit is not always bad. Credit can make you who you can be in the future.
Aissata Sy, Bowie State University
One of the shockers for me is when I learned that people our age, young adults, 18 to 24, a lot of them don’t know how to check their credit score or know where to go (to find out). Having that tool is very important. You could just be freewheeling down here and not know what your score is, and then you go to buy your car, they check your score and it’s like, ‘Oh.’ And you didn’t know. So, checking that and keeping up with that is very, very important to know where you stand.