Recent college graduate Rachel Ross is on a mission to increase financial literacy among college students. While she knows firsthand that opening an account on impulse initially for a pair of jeans she couldn’t afford meant three years of digging out of debt, she was motivated by the even greater struggles of peers whom she watched open two accounts a week, run up debt and misuse student loans during her college career at Hampton University.
“You can be a math whiz, engineering student, in marketing, and acing everything in school, but if you are not educated on this topic you can make serious mistakes that have a long-lasting impact on your future,” Ross said. “It’s not about your GPA. If you weren’t taught at home and didn’t get it in school, I can see how people get in trouble.”
A 2011 public relations graduate, Ross acknowledges that Hampton now offers freshman students financial literacy as part of a mandatory class. “It’s something that is really needed,” Ross said. “Ideally, it should be more than one class.”
It was a semester-long internship with a credit card company that wanted to participate in financial literacy advocacy through student ambassadors that pushed Ross into a personal quest to educate everyone she knew about the woes of misusing credit. As an intern ambassador for Master Card, Ross gave 13 financial literacy presentations to a total of 1,000 Hampton University and high school students in the area. In addition, she has written an op-ed for the Virginian-Pilot newspaper and has hosted a biweekly video blog for nearly a year — even after the internship ended.
“I was hired by Master Card to give presentations to people at school on what credit is, best practices, and budgeting during the first semester of my senior year,” she said. “I think 90 percent were really engaged and shocked about the facts they were hearing. After the presentations many took it upon themselves to follow up and learn more.”
“I continued doing it on my own after the internship. I had the materials, and I wanted to get the word out.”
Now working in Boston, Ross continues to speak to students on her own time, including reaching out to younger students.
