Students in credit crisis
Educating students on financial responsibility
2015-09-15
(Press-News.org) New research from the USA suggests that college students are well aware that they should be personally responsible for their finances, including their card obligations, but this awareness rarely correlates with limiting the debts they accrue during their time in higher education. Details of the study are reported this month in the International Journal of Behavioural Accounting and Finance.
Lucy Ackert of the Department of Economics and Finance, at Kennesaw State University, in Georgia, and Bryan Church of the Scheller College of Business, at Georgia Tech, Atlanta, USA, explain that policymakers are concerned about the limited financial expertise of young adults and how inexperience with financial matters can leave students with excessive debts. Ackert and Church have undertaken three parallel studies to better understand the financial acumen or otherwise of college students and whether or not their level of awareness correlates with financial responsibility.
"Credit cards have become a way of life, offering convenience and purchase protection, allowing for online shopping, and providing a cushion in case of emergencies," the researchers explain. Many young people with no credit history can successfully apply for a credit card. As such, consumer advocates have expressed concerns over the years that those who may not necessarily have the financial means to support such credit card use are vulnerable to unscrupulous companies and can be led into serious, long-term financial harm.
College students are an important demographic for financial services, the team adds. However, they may be characterized in general as "having limited resources and being financially naïve and not only lacking experience but being susceptible to lapses in self-control." The team points out that credit card issuers compete vigorously for college students' business, partly in the hope of attracting potentially loyal customers for future dealings, such as car loans and mortgages, after graduation.
The disconnection between recognizing the need to be financially responsible and actually being so must be addressed before students learn too many bad habits with their money, the team's results suggest. "If college students are to make wise financial decisions they must internalize the obligation to exercise financial responsibility," they say. "It is their duty to spend prudently and to pay their bills when due, and a failure to do so is unacceptable." Education regarding the misuse of credit cards and the consequences of long-term debt ought to be enshrined in a college education at an early stage of the academic career, the research suggests.
INFORMATION:
Ackert, L.F. and Church, B.K. (2015) 'Credit cards, financial responsibility, and college students: an experimental study', Int. J. Behavioural Accounting and Finance, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp.1-26.
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2015-09-15
The most obvious disadvantage of putting your data in the cloud is losing access when you have no internet connection. According to research publishes in the International Journal of Cloud Computing, this is where "dew" could help. Yingwei Wang of the Department of Computer Science, at the University of Prince Edward Island, Charlottetown, Canada, describes what he refers to as a "cloud-dew" architecture that offers an efficient and elegant way to counteract cloud downtime and communication difficulties.
In the world of cloud computing, users and organizations keep their ...
2015-09-15
MANHATTAN, KANSAS - U.S. farmers are growing fewer types of crops than they were 34 years ago, which could have implications for how farms fare as changes to the climate evolve, according to a large-scale study by Kansas State University, North Dakota State University and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Less crop diversity may also be impacting the general ecosystem.
"At the national level, crop diversity declined over the period we analyzed," said Jonathan Aguilar, K-State water resources engineer and lead researcher on the study.
The scientists used data from ...
2015-09-15
LA JOLLA--Salk scientists have developed a new way to selectively activate brain, heart, muscle and other cells using ultrasonic waves. The new technique, dubbed sonogenetics, has some similarities to the burgeoning use of light to activate cells in order to better understand the brain.
This new method--which uses the same type of waves used in medical sonograms--may have advantages over the light-based approach--known as optogenetics--particularly when it comes to adapting the technology to human therapeutics. It was described September 15, 2015 in the journal Nature ...
2015-09-15
The addition of a daily outdoor activity class at school for three years for children in Guangzhou, China, resulted in a reduction in the rate of myopia (nearsightedness, the ability to see close objects more clearly than distant objects), according to a study in the September 15 issue of JAMA.
Myopia has reached epidemic levels in young adults in some urban areas of East and Southeast Asia. In these areas, 80 percent to 90 percent of high school graduates now have myopia. Myopia also appears to be increasing, more slowly, in populations of European and Middle Eastern ...
2015-09-15
Women are less likely than men to be full professors at U.S. medical schools, and receive less start-up support from their institutions for biomedical research, according to two studies in the September 15 issue of JAMA.
Women now make up half of all U.S. medical school graduates. However, sex disparities in senior faculty rank persist in academic medicine. Whether differences in age, experience, specialty, and research productivity between sexes explain persistent disparities in faculty rank has not been studied. Anupam B. Jena, M.D., Ph.D., of Harvard Medical School, ...
2015-09-15
Patients undergoing surgery for a hip fracture were older and had more medical conditions than patients who underwent an elective total hip replacement, factors that may contribute to the higher risk of in-hospital death and major postoperative complications experienced by hip fracture surgery patients, according to a study in the September 15 issue of JAMA.
Although hip surgery can improve mobility and pain, it can be associated with major postoperative medical complications and mortality. Patients undergoing surgery for a hip fracture are at substantially higher risk ...
2015-09-15
Women physicians are substantially less likely to be full professors than men of similar age, experience, specialty and research productivity.
With recent increases in the number of women attending medical school, women now comprise nearly half of all new physicians. But the proportion of women at the rank of fullprofessor at U.S. medical schools has not changed since 1980, despite efforts to increase equity, according to a new research study led by Anupam Jena, associate professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School. The results are published today in JAMA.
"Many ...
2015-09-15
A group of scientists from ITMO University, Australian National University and Aalto University called into question the results of a study, published by the researchers from Cambridge University in a prestigious scientific journal Physical Review Letters. In the original study, the British scientists claimed that they managed to find the missing link in the electromagnetic theory. The findings, according to the scientists, could help decrease the size of antennas in electronic devices manifold, promising a major breakthrough in the field of wireless communications.
The ...
2015-09-15
Drugs commonly used to treat high blood pressure, and prevent heart attacks and strokes, are associated with significantly worse cardiovascular outcomes in hypertensive African Americans compared to whites, according to a new comparative effectiveness research study led by researchers in the Department of Population Health at NYU Langone Medical Center.
The study, published on September 15 in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology (JACC), is unique, the authors say, in that it evaluates racial differences in cardiovascular outcomes and mortality between hypertensive ...
2015-09-15
Are climate predictions over periods of several years reliable if weather forecast are still only possible for short periods of several days? Nevertheless there are options to predict the development of key parameters on such long time scales. A new study led by scientists at GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel shows how the well-known 11-year cycle of solar activity affects the long-time development of dominant large-scale pressure systems in the Northern Hemisphere.
For their investigations the scientists used a coupled ocean-atmosphere model. In addition, ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Students in credit crisis
Educating students on financial responsibility
