Owning Your Future: How a new minor teaches students to navigate money, media, and modern careers
College teaches students plenty of things. Managing money and figuring out how to present yourself to the world aren’t always among them. The University of Arizona’s new Personal Brand and Money Management minor wants to change that.
U of A students shake hands with prospective employers at STEM Career Fair on campus.
College students have plenty to worry about before they graduate.
There’s the obvious stuff: finding a job, paying rent, figuring out health insurance. Then there are the things that are harder to see coming – how to make a paycheck stretch, whether that retirement account from a first job is actually worth paying attention to, what a future employer will find online and how to explain, without sounding like a walking resume, what you’re actually good at.
None of those questions come with a syllabus. Until now.
The University of Arizona’s Norton School of Human Ecology is taking a different approach. Beginning this fall, the school will offer an 18-unit undergraduate minor in Personal Brand and Money Management, bringing together two areas of modern life that increasingly require people to manage themselves: their money and their professional identity.
The idea isn’t that today’s students need to be taught how to “adult.” In many ways, they’re already doing it. They’re coming of age at a moment when some of the old defaults have disappeared and when the choices they make can follow them in ways they didn’t used to. Careers are less likely to follow a single path. Retirement savings are something many workers have to manage for themselves. And a professional identity can precede a professional life, while the internet can preserve pieces of who you were long after you’ve moved on.
“Students need to leave the university with a full set of skills,” said Laura Scaramella, director of the Norton School. “Their whole world is on the internet, it’s on social media - there’s a digital presence, and if they don’t know how to responsibly leverage that, they’re going to be at a disadvantage.”
The money question isn’t really about coffee
Personal finance advice has a tendency to become a morality play.
Don’t buy the latte. Skip the vacation. Stop eating out. If you just make enough good choices, the story goes, financial security will eventually follow.
Victoria Ligon, an associate professor of practice in personal and family financial planning at the Norton School, takes a less judgmental view in her classroom.
“The class is called Personal Finance Foundations: Achieving Financial Wellbeing,” she said. “The emphasis is on financial wellbeing, not how to get rich.”
Financial wellbeing, in Ligon's view, isn't about accumulating as much money as possible. It's about what that money makes possible.
“If going out for coffee on Saturday morning is the highlight of your week, that’s valuable spending,” Ligon said. “But if you’re buying coffee because you overslept, three days in a row, and you don’t even like Starbucks, that’s not valuable spending.”
That’s especially relevant for students who rarely use cash. A tap of a phone doesn’t feel quite like spending money in the way handing over a $20 bill does.
“They use Apple Pay. They use electronic forms of payment,” Scaramella said. “If you’re tapping, you can go through it really fast and not even realize what you’ve spent.”
In one class project, students track their discretionary spending and look at what those purchases could mean over time.
“What seems like disposable income, you realize is a loss of potential wealth,” Scaramella said.
The point isn’t to make students feel guilty about a $6 coffee. It’s to make the invisible visible.
“Money is a facilitator of the things that actually matter in life,” Ligon said.
Your resume isn’t the whole story anymore
The other half of the minor starts with a similarly ordinary reality these days: Before students ever walk into an interview, they may already have a searchable, digital presence. A LinkedIn profile. A social media account. A portfolio. A name that can be searched in seconds.
“Personal branding” can conjure the world of influencers, carefully curated feeds and people turning their online presence into a career. And that’s one possible trajectory, but a personal brand doesn’t have to mean building an audience. It can mean something as practical as knowing what you bring to a job, how you go about it, and what an employer finds when they look you up.
In other words, “branding” in the new minor is about something truly foundational: knowing what you bring to the table and knowing how to communicate it.
“It is more about marketing their abilities and skills, and that’s what we want students to take away,” Scaramella said. “The program is about supporting leaders in the making.”
For some students, that may mean learning how to present themselves to an employer. For others, it could mean understanding how their digital presence affects professional opportunities or navigating Name, Image and Likeness opportunities as a student-athlete.
Entrepreneurship in the NIL era
While every student enters the workforce with a digital footprint, student-athletes face this dynamic on a fast-forward timeline. With NIL opportunities on the rise, student-athletes must learn to navigate the fine print such as brand alignment, contract language, and tax obligations.
Arizona has more than 500 student-athletes across 22 sports and many of them recognize how their platform as Wildcats can serve as a foundation for long-term success.
Recognizing the overlap, Arizona Athletics partnered with the Norton School to bring the minor to its roster.
“We are grateful to partner with The Norton School on this impactful and innovative program,” said R. Ken Coit Director of Athletics Desireé Reed-Francois. “The Personal Brand and Money Management minor is imperative for our student-athletes in this new era of college athletics. It equips them to leverage their NIL opportunities here at the University of Arizona, build their brand, and learn valuable financial management skills that will position them as leaders in whatever career path they pursue after graduation.”
The common thread is agency
The days when someone might spend an entire career with one employer are not necessarily the model students are preparing for now. Many people will have multiple employers – and potentially multiple careers – over the course of their working lives, Ligon said.
What skills do you carry with you and translate into the next opportunity? What do you know about your money and how are you making it work for you? How do you present yourself and your brand when the next opportunity comes along?
For Ligon, that’s where personal branding and financial literacy meet. Students, she said, increasingly see both their careers and their finances as things they need to take ownership of. “They tell me: I have to make my own way in the world, be that with money or with building my career, and at the end of the day, I want to own those assets,” she said.
The minor also grew out of something less abstract than changing economic conditions. Ligon said she has had students approach her for years after taking her personal finance course.
“I don’t want to be a financial planner, but I really see this is valuable for my life,” they would tell her. “Can I minor in personal finance training for myself?”
The question points to a gap between what students need to know and what a traditional curriculum necessarily covers.
The Norton School already has courses that address pieces of the puzzle, including Personal Finance Foundations, Consumer Behavior and Influencer Phenomenon. The new minor connects those areas into a course of study that students can pursue alongside virtually any major.
And the students asking for it aren’t necessarily looking for a career in finance or marketing. They’re looking for something more practical: a better understanding of the decisions they’re already going to have to make.
“It’s a privilege to be able to reach students at this moment in their lives, when they are so open to future possibilities,” Ligon said. “They’re not naïve, they want to learn how to manage these things well to support a life and a future that’s meaningful to them.”
That may be the most useful way to think about the new minor. The money students earn, the skills they build and the identities they create are all things they’ll carry with them. The goal is to make sure they know how to leverage them.