How institutions are teaching faculty and staff to speak institutional finances
While central finance offices steward the budget, financial responsibility lives across campus. Deans, department chairs, and administrative leaders routinely make decisions about staffing, spending, and resource allocation.
As resources tighten, decisions get harder, and the cost of making them without shared financial context goes up. Leaders may struggle to understand tradeoffs, while employees can interpret cuts or constraints as arbitrary. EAB’s research on institutional resilience points to the same challenge: faculty and staff often lack the context needed to understand long-term budget pressures or make strategic cost reductions.
To address this, a growing number of institutions are establishing permanent structures to teach their faculty and staff how their institution’s finances actually work and how to make better decisions. Here’s how early adopters are creating effective financial literacy programs.
Four Practices that Make Financial Literacy Programs Work
The programs vary in size, audience, and format, but they cover similar ground. This includes how revenue and costs flow, how budget models allocate funds to units and the day-to-day mechanics of things like procurement, account reconciliation, and fraud prevention. Programs focus on the “what and why” of institutional financial operations rather than simply teaching employees how to use financial technology.
Drawing on programs already running in the field, EAB’s identified four best practices to incorporate in the design of a financial literacy program:
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Distinguish required learning from broader development
Not every employee needs the same level of financial knowledge. Institutions can require training for employees with formal fiscal responsibilities while opening additional courses to anyone who wants to build their skills. The University of Kentucky, for example, requires its Financial and Administration Specialized Training (FAST) program for roughly 2,100 employees with defined financial responsibilities, while another 1,700 employees have taken at least one FAST course voluntarily, nearly doubling the program’s reach.
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Combine scalable learning with opportunities for live exploration
Online courses make it possible to reach large numbers of employees and track completion. Cohort-based or live sessions, like the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Finance @UW, create these connections in person. The program runs as three-hour workshops held weekly over four weeks, with randomized seating that puts employees from different parts of the campus at the same table.
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Always pair financial concepts with institutional
Higher education has quirks no other sector shares, and every institution adds its own unique layer on top. Effective programs teach both the sector-wide concepts and the local vocabulary. UW-Madison splits the two by format: general basics are covered asynchronously through LinkedIn Learning, while the in-person program goes deep on what accounting and revenue look like within their own unique organizations.
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Treat financial literacy as an ongoing capability
Budget models evolve, policies change, and employees switch roles. One-time training is unlikely to be enough. University of Kentucky, for example, requires participants in its ongoing FAST program to complete two additional courses every six months, with options selected from a larger course library.
Two Models in Practice
Build for Scale
University of Kentucky: Finance and Administration Specialized Training (FAST)
The University of Kentucky‘s (FAST) program is designed to embed financial and administrative knowledge across a large institution.
The program is mandatory for employees with defined fiscal responsibilities, including employees responsible for account reconciliation, financial reporting, cost centers, certain transactions, and other financial activities. Mandated employees must finish the introductory sequence within 60 days. Other employees can take FAST courses voluntarily.
The program starts with a FAST Program Overview course and three introductory Financial Foundations courses cover fraud prevention, account reconciliation, and internal controls. From there, mandatory participants complete two additional courses every six months. These courses are pulled from a growing library of more than 40 web-based courses covering topics like procurement, payroll, and other university-specific financial processes.
The results show up in participation. Over a two year period, Kentucky reports that 100% of its roughly 2,100 mandated employees completed FAST on time, and another 1,699 employees voluntarily completed at least one course.
Build for Depth and Connection
University of Wisconsin-Madison: Finance@UW
UW–Madison takes a cohort-based approach through Finance@UW. The program is aimed at employees with financial roles or responsibilities on campus, but is open to anyone on campus with interest, as long as they commit to the full cohort. Each cohort is capped at 75 participants.
Its core curriculum covers:
- Principles of Institutional Finance
- Revenue@UW
- Accounting@UW
- Budgets@UWÂ
Each session is co-hosted by campus financial experts and leadership, such as an AVC, Controller, or CFO. The program also includes four non-financial sessions and technology training. Separately, the program anchors an annual day-long conference open to employees across the institution. The topics range from core finance concepts like tuition remission to leadership and team development. Roughly 600 employees attend each year.
All sessions are spread across weekly three-hour workshops over the course of a month. Fifty staff completed the program in its first year (2023), while more than 400 have completed it to date. The UW-Madison design treats financial literacy as a professional community, not just a compliance requirement.
If you’re ready to build financial fluency on your campus, EAB’s Building a Financially Resilient University: How to Navigate an Industry in Flux webinar walks through institutions doing this work.Â
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