One crash course for many college students isn't listed on a class schedule. As they enter higher education, they're often for the first time managing thousands of dollars from financial aid, or even a family-supplied stash for the semester.

College administrators here say they've witnessed far too many times students who get in a financial bind because of a lack of basic money management skills, from checkbook balancing to budgeting financial-aid dollars.

"No one teaches them; where do students learn?" says Jim White, dean of financial services at Gonzaga University. "The assumption is students learn this from their parents, and there are students whose parents aren't doing a very good job at money management. It's glaringly absent in our culture."

Consequently, Spokane-area colleges and universities within the past few years have bolstered free services to teach students more about personal finance, also called financial literacy—a trend seen nationally as well. The support is usually through free workshops, one-on-one counseling, and online tools.

Many schools here also offer access to the National Endowment for Financial Education's online CashCourse via the schools' websites to give students an interactive resource with money-wise articles, quizzes, calculators, and budgeting tools.

White says Gonzaga started offering CashCourse on its financial-aid website about three months ago. He says CashCourse fits into the university's plan to boost its students' financial literacy, including a revamped workshop with handbooks it plans to offer on a regular basis starting this spring.

Sallie Mae Inc., a financial services company specializing in education, said in a 2009 report that 84 percent of undergraduates polled in a survey indicated they need more financial-management education.

Eastern Washington University offers CashCourse as an online tool, and about three years ago, it began free financial literacy workshops on campus, says Karin Jewell, an EWU Student Financial Services program specialist. A workshop the school hosts up to four times a year typically draws between 10 and 20 students, Jewell says.

"It's a crash course on everything a college student should know about basic money management," she says. "It's things like budgeting, balancing your checkbook, even just writing a basic check, because a lot of students don't know how to do that."

Jewell teaches the workshops along with a second instructor, but another of her roles is handling EWU collections for student accounts and the federal Perkins loans. This includes taking in collections for student tuition, fees, bounced checks, parking infractions, and library fines.

"I see the need when people get in trouble with their finances," she says. "These are 18 or 19 year olds, and they need to understand how to manage their money. I don't think they realize it until they get in trouble, and we try to get them to realize it before they get in trouble."

She adds that some have had jobs while others haven't, and students don't always realize that money concerns now can affect their financial life later.

Another campus here, Washington State University Spokane, has paired with the Spokane Teachers Credit Union to offer what it calls a brown-bag series—with free student lunches—that covers money-management topics. The campus held an extended financial literacy week Oct. 11-17, with daily subjects on budgeting, understanding a credit report, eating well cheaply, finding deals, and holiday budgeting. WSU's main website also offers access to CashCourse.

Other WSU Spokane topics cover preparing for a major car or home purchase after school, and one session focuses on savings and investments. It also is among several campuses here that hold sessions on understanding student loan repayment.

"Financial literacy is a term all universities are aware of, and they're trying to increase the financial literacy of their students," says Liz West, WSU Spokane assistant director of student affairs.

She adds, "They (universities) want them to understand the consequences of borrowing so they can borrow responsibly, and pay it back responsibly."

At Whitworth University, the school is revamping its financial literacy program as part of a new student resource success center that opened this fall. Whitworth also is developing a new Web page dedicated to financial literacy information, and CashCourse is one of several options being considered as part of that, says Traci Stensland, Whitworth's associate director of financial aid.

Part of the challenge is its past financial workshops weren't well attended, and Stensland says Whitworth decided to reevaluate the subject for its student success center that also offers career, academic, and other support. New approaches might include targeted messages and topics timed as students might need the information, such as avoiding identity theft during holiday shopping.

"It's all part of education that helps a person be successful, but people come to the university with different backgrounds," she says. "Some come with fiscal knowledge. Some are here, and their parents have done it all. Some have no knowledge, and some have different values."

Meanwhile, Gonzaga's White says the financial-aid office there often sees parents, rather than the students, asking questions about managing aid and loans.

"The other thing that's going on in our culture that higher-education members are aware of is parents are doing more and more in students' lives, very much hovering and managing everything," he says. "They're very engaged in their children's lives, such that many students come to college without any experience of money management because their parents have taken care of it."

EWU's Jewell adds that it's not unusual for students who live off-campus to receive $3,000 to $4,000 a quarter from financial aid for living expenses, after tuition and fees are paid.

"It's intended to be used over a course of three to four months to pay rent, buy them groceries, for paying their cell phone bill, transportation, buying books, anything related to education or living expenses," Jewell adds. "Many of them have never had $3,000 to $4,000 at their disposal before, and they'll go out and spend it very quickly."

Those living on campus in many cases will get $1,000 to $2,000 from financial aid—after tuition, fees, and room and board—for miscellaneous living and educational expenses such as books, she adds.

"We also tell them, right now that is their income line, but when they're done with school, this will be their outgo because they have to pay it back, that portion that is part of a student loan," she says.

Jeffrey Waybright is a Spokane Community College accounting instructor who also teaches free money management seminars there. Held up to six times an academic year, the seminars are offered through SCC's Student Success and Career Services, which advertises the one-hour sessions through fliers. Waybright has conducted the seminars for about two years, and his topics also cover spending habits, budgeting, disciplined savings, credit card basics, and the power of compounding money.

He adds, "There's a huge acknowledgment that money management is an issue, whether they are students coming out of high school or older people returning to school. It's a big issue for our students."

Students in the classes range from age 18 on up, and Waybright says he most often fields questions about credit card debt. "So they're all in different stages of their lives," he says. "I get questions on the credit more than anything, and it's probably coming from people who are already in credit trouble."

EWU's Jewell says she encounters another challenge: how to convince college students that they really do need to reconcile their checking accounts.

"There's a common belief that with modern technology, they think they'll get a text that tells them when their balance is low, or they can just click on their iPhone and see how much they have in their checking account ," she adds.

She says she tries to describe real-life examples, such as when she and her 17-year-old son bought merchandise from a popular teen clothing website and unknowingly clicked on the page for an additional service charging $5 a month from the checking account.

"I found it by balancing our checkbook in the first month, but I could see with my son not checking his, it could have been a year," Jewell says.

She adds, "We try to convince students it's important. It's a hard sell."