By Kyle Oppenhuizen

Helping Iowa college students graduate with less debt is a process that starts well before the first tuition check.
 
That’s the message that Gov. Terry Branstad and others delivered at a press conference this morning, as they announced a new financial literacy program designed to teach students from grades eight through 12 to be more responsible with their finances as they go to college or enter the work force.
 
The program is being implemented at every high school in the state through the Iowa College Student Aid Commission, using an interactive online curriculum designed by EverFi Inc. The program will become part of the core curriculum in high schools, officials said.
 
“We as a nation today are facing a huge problem because of debt,” Branstad said. “Knowing how to navigate the world of personal finance is a critical piece of being successful in life. That will be an important part of education.”
 
The program will be implemented starting this week as teachers learn how to use the tools on EverFi’s customized website, www.ihaveaplaniowa.gov. Students will start using the materials as early as the current semester.
 
“In our data, three or four years ago we began to notice that our students were leaving college with a tremendous amount of debt. We’re not talking $10,000. We’re talking $50,000 or $60,000,” said Janet Adams, chairperson of the Iowa College Student Aid Commission. “We knew that wasn’t sustainable. Many of them are going out into jobs and occupations that were not paying anywhere near that. So we decided to look at some kind of a long-term approach to solving this.”

The curriculum costs about $450,000 a year to run, an Iowa College Student Aid Commission spokesperson said.
 
The program will be backed through a public-private partnership, with some of the money coming from the federal government’s College Access Challenge Grant and part of it from the Iowa Bankers Association and by getting local banks involved.
 
The specifics are still being worked out, but Branstad said the federal money would provide more of a launching pad and that he hopes the program can be privately sustained in the long term.
 
EverFi is in its third year of operations, and has 3,000 schools in 49 states using the curriculum, said CEO Tom Davidson. The lessons are designed to take students through “hundreds of different topics, which means hundreds of different scenarios,” he said, through videos, animations and interactive exercises.