PeliCoins: Is it Producing an Outcome?
Dr. Fisher, the head of the financial literacy program, said that teaching high school students how to manage their money is especially important to her because when she taught in college, she witnessed many kids make significant, preventable financial mistakes. Her experiences with college students prompted her to start the PeliCoin program.
The program aims to teach kids financial literacy in a fun, interactive way. Students earn PeliCoin by attending various financial literacy events. These events happen every few weeks, and there are various prizes you can win with your PeliCoin, depending on how much you have. Dr. Fisher stated that when it comes to prizes, she’s pretty open-minded, and that a part of the program is to decide what you want to do with your PeliCoin. She stated, “Some popular prizes are Amazon and Uber Eats gift cards, but the most popular thing people bought were tickets to an end of year reception that had upscale hors d’oerves, music, and alumni networking. People had a really great time last year.”
One aspect of the program Dr. Fisher says she wishes she could change would be being able to buy time, stating that “the resource that we are all short of is time, we could all use more of it, and I wish we could find ways to help you buy more time. I haven’t found a way to do that the deans or administration approves of yet, but if I could that would be a major breakthrough. It would make the program valuable even to people that have as much money as they could possibly need.” While I do agree that being able to ‘buy time’ with your PeliCoin – essentially finding ways to free up or save time – would be a cool feature of the program, I don’t think it's a realistic feature, nor one we can expect any time soon.
Overall, I think the program, in terms of participation, has been successful, with around 200 students enrolled this year; a number that is expected to grow. With 200 students involved in the program, and with 736 students at Loomis in general, there is a twenty-seven percent participation rate.
In conclusion, PeliCoin is certainly an interesting program that Loomis offers to students, and I think they should advertise it more. I know that I would like to see more advertisements for financial literacy and PeliCoin in general, like during class meetings, convocations, the daily bulletin, and even posters around campus.