Faculty Perspectives on Financial Capability and Asset Building Content in Social Work Education

Background and Purpose: Consensus is building that financial capability and asset building (FCAB) interventions have a central role in social work practice (Sherraden, 2013). Research points to the need to better prepare social work practitioners with FCAB knowledge and skills. Faculty endorsement of integrating content is critical for successful curricular change. However, little is known about how social work faculty perceive the utility of including such content in their courses.

Methods: Email invitations to participate in an online survey were sent to 7,642 faculty members from 571 CSWE accredited social work programs. Recruited faculty were teaching, or have taught social work courses, since August 2016. Data were collected from 1,577 faculty members between August 2016 and May 2017. Among other items, respondents were asked about how useful they thought it is for students in their programs to learn about 23 topics previously identified as relevant to FCAB practice. The 23 items related to one of three domains: financial products and services, public policies and programs, and financial management practice. These domains cover topics such as bank products, credit reports, public assistance benefits, and having money conversations with clients. Each item has four possible responses of “Not at all (0),” “Slightly (1),” “Moderately (2),” and “Very (3)” useful. Three aggregate measures were generated from these 23 items. The first was a dichotomous variable (yes = 1, no = 0) indicating whether the respondent reported that any of the topics was at least “slightly” useful. The second variable, ranging from 0 to 23, summed the number of items that are considered at least “moderately” useful. The third aggregate variable was the sum scale of these 23 variables, ranging from 0 to 69. Logit, poisson, and OLS regression analyses were conducted to predict these three variables adjusting for faculty demographic and program characteristics.  

Results: Overall, 91% of faculty respondents reported that FCAB education would be beneficial for social work students. On average, respondents ranked 19 of 23 items as moderately or very useful for their students. Multivariate analyses suggest that perceived usefulness of FCAB education is associated with faculty race and rank. African American faculty are more likely to say FCAB education is important, especially for topics about financial products and services. The number of FCAB topics considered useful by African American faculty is 9.5% more than that of their White counterparts (p<.05); the sum scale of perceived usefulness for African American faculty is 5.4 points higher than that of their White counterparts (p<.05). Full professors (compared to other ranks) perceived the usefulness of FCAB lower than other instructors.

Conclusions and implications: The results indicate that faculty generally find it useful for students to learn about various FCAB topics. The implications of faculty’s perceived usefulness of promoting FCAB education in the social work curriculum and its potential impact on the profession’s role in serving vulnerable households will be explored. The implications of racial and faculty rank differences in perception of importance will also be discussed.