Eric John
Professor of Practice
Department of Finance
College of Business
Course(s) Targeted by this Innovation
FINA 315: Personal Investing and Finance
Development and Implementation
2026-2027
Purpose and Impact
FINA 315 is a 100-student general education course that introduces students to practical financial decisions they are likely to encounter throughout their lives. The course addresses broad and highly relevant areas of personal financial planning, including budgeting and cash flow management, debt decisions, homeownership, investing, insurance, retirement planning, tax planning, estate planning, and long-term saving goals such as college funding.
Because these topics affect nearly all students as future earners, borrowers, savers, investors, and consumers, the course has significant potential to strengthen financial literacy, improve student learning, and enhance workforce readiness. It is also especially well suited for AI integration because students are increasingly exposed to financial advice generated by digital tools that may appear polished and persuasive even when the information is incomplete, oversimplified, or inaccurate.
For that reason, FINA 315 provides an ideal setting not only to teach core finance concepts, but also to help students learn how to use AI responsibly, question its recommendations, and verify its reasoning. This combination of financial literacy and AI literacy aligns closely with the grant’s goals of promoting stronger learning outcomes, deeper engagement, and workforce-relevant skills through thoughtful and responsible AI integration.
Description of Innovation
The proposed redesign would incorporate AI into FINA 315 as a structured tool for personal finance analysis, decision support, and critical evaluation. Students would use AI to think through common financial planning questions involving retirement saving, college saving, debt repayment, budgeting, insurance coverage, housing decisions, taxes, and estate-related planning, while also being required to assess whether the AI’s output is accurate, realistic, and appropriate. The purpose is not to let AI make decisions for students, but to help them develop the habit of using it thoughtfully while applying sound financial reasoning.
As part of this redesign, students would use AI to organize information, identify key decision factors, compare alternatives, and outline possible solution paths for common personal finance scenarios. For example, they might use AI to evaluate tradeoffs in retirement planning, estimate the long-term impact of college savings, compare debt or housing options, or think through insurance and estate planning needs. They would then refine, test, and correct that output using course concepts and calculations, helping them see that AI can be useful for structure and brainstorming, but that good financial decisions still depend on careful reasoning, verification, and context.
A second major component of the redesign would focus on evaluating and communicating AI-generated financial advice. Students would examine where AI performs well and where it may become unreliable, such as when it overlooks cash flow constraints, relies on unrealistic assumptions, confuses tax treatment, or offers advice that is too generic for a person’s actual circumstances. This is especially important in a personal finance course because many students will continue encountering AI-generated financial guidance long after the class ends, so learning to question and verify that guidance is part of preparing them for everyday life.
Overall, the redesign would strengthen FINA 315 both as a general education course and as a practical setting for responsible AI literacy, leaving students with stronger personal finance knowledge, better habits for evaluating digital advice, and more confidence in using AI responsibly in real-world financial decisions.