Moneythink


Moneythink is an American non-profit organization that harnesses the power of people and technology to bring transparency to college costs while ensuring that all students have the opportunity to complete a post-secondary degree with little to no debt. Through its products, Moneythink works to ensure that all students, especially those from traditionally under-represented communities, are able to minimize financial complexity and risk while maximizing potential as they navigate the college matriculation process and beyond. As a leader in youth-focused financial wellness since 2008, Moneythink has served over 32,000 students. In 2020, Moneythink is releasing a public-facing, no cost version of its Award Comparison Tool, the first of its kind to use optical character recognition and machine learning.

History

2008-2016

Moneythink started as a student organization at the University of Chicago in 2008. First named the American Investment Fellows, the club was founded by students Ted Gonder, Greg Nance, Shashin Chokshi, Morgan Hartley, and David Chen. The group's aim was to help the South Chicago community in the wake of the economic collapse by recruiting, training, and placing economics undergraduate majors in inner-city 11th and 12th-grade classrooms to teach financial literacy workshops.
By the fall of 2009, student-leaders at Washington University in St. Louis, USC, and other universities across the US began working with the Chicago chapter, starting identical clubs on their own campuses. Between the spring of 2010 and the fall of 2011, the club spread to 24 campus communities nationwide. During this time, the campuses aligned under the collective name, Moneythink, taking on hundreds of volunteer mentors. Responding to the expansion, Moneythink incubated at the Kauffman Foundation where Ted Gonder professionalized the organization, gaining official 501 non-profit status.
In 2011, Moneythink named Gonder their chief executive officer and hired a full-time staff. A year later, Moneythink was honored with the White House Champions of Change award and set the goal of achieving mainstream financial capability among American youth by 2030. In 2012, the organization's logo was featured on the NASDAQ billboard in Times Square.
In 2013, Moneythink collaborated with IDEO and Ideas42 to develop a mobile app to use as a companion to its Financial Capability Curriculum. In 2014, the app, Moneythink Mobile, officially launched in participating classrooms.

2016-2019

Beginning in 2016, Moneythink committed to finding the most strategic, highest leverage intervention for the largest number of students who could benefit from its services in the most timely and impactful way. The organization identified college matriculation – and students’ ability to pay for college – as the key inflection point prime for intervention and innovation. This evolution was the result of Moneythink’s early success in providing financial literacy training underscored by hundreds of hours of in-person student interviews and feedback, its own research studies, and ongoing learnings of best and next practices from the college advising and affordability field.
To tackle college affordability on a larger scale, the organization integrated a human-design approach, research-backed, and tech-driven college financial coaching service targeting college-bound low-income and 1st-generation 12th graders. The intent of the program would support the development of college advising and financial empowerment habits, while also impacting long-term behavioral change that increased pathways to greater economic mobility and social capital.
Through its programs and tech tools, Moneythink ensured students were primed to take advantage of the economic opportunities available to them: increasing the likelihood of success by providing enrollment and college tuition funding information, reducing debt, and maximizing financial aid.
Operationally, between 2016-2018, Moneythink established an organizational presence in the San Francisco Bay Area, where its staff remain headquartered today. In October, 2018, joined the organization as its CEO, succeeding Ted Gonder after a highly impactful 10-year tenure. Before joining Moneythink, Lachs effectively served at the forefront of local, regional, and national educational and social enterprise organizations centered on college and career readiness, as well as economic development and social justice.
Lachs had served as Chief Business Development Officer at internationally-reaching Net Impact; CEO at Breakthrough Collaborative, a national college access and teacher prep organization with the country’s largest pre-residency program for aspiring educators; Chief Officer of Workforce Development for Goodwill Industries of San Francisco, San Mateo, and Marin counties; and prior, a lengthy career as a university dean and executive director scaling programs, diversifying revenue streams, and growing partnerships for globally-facing campuses. In early 2019, the organization solidified its culture and internal operations and began focusing on longer term strategy and wide-scale impact.

In 2019, Moneythink unveiled its bold vision: to help create an inclusive economy through sustainable solutions and long-term behavioral change. By 2025, its aim is to have reached and empowered over 1 million students across all 50 states earning college degrees, while helping them – and America – avoid $10.8 billion in total student debt.

Moneythink’s student outcomes were positive and affirmed the pathway towards achieving its vision, including:
Given Moneythink’s historical focus on youth-centered financial wellness, combined with the growing awareness of the student debt crisis intersected with the college completion gap, Moneythink began researching the most effective and logical pathways to meet the problem at scale. One of the organization’s first findings pointed to a huge divide in student services. Students were not typically advised on the larger financial wellness and career planning consequences of their enrollment decisions. Another leading driver discovered by the organization was inaccurate information about the bottom-line costs of attendance. This was underscored by the often misleading and inconsistent financial aid award letters that were sent by colleges to accepted students. Without any existing solutions for financial aid award letter comparison, the organization, again, saw another opportunity.  
Leveraging nearly a decade of work in tech-driven financial capability solutions for youth, Moneythink doubled-down on a new product launch: using optical character recognition and machine learning software to convert financial aid award images into cohesive, understandable, easy-to-compare formats – particularly for low-income and 1st-generation students.

Early 2020 and Beyond

Moneythink is creating a public-facing, no-cost Award Comparison Tool that helps low-income and 1st-gen students to plan for, cover, and manage all of their college costs through a healthy mix of aid, savings, loans, and work.

The problem facing students and families today:

The nation’s $1.6T in student debt is fueled by opaque pricing in higher education.
Financial aid awards are a big part of the problem.

Moneythink's Award Comparison Tool

Award Comparison Tool allows students and their families to:
Award comparison technology takes the guesswork out of college affordability:
  1. Students upload financial aid award letters & see it converted to a digital user friendly format...
  2. An accurate comparison of award packages
  3. Breakdown of costs, grants, & unmet need
  4. Actionable guidance based on loan and work best practice
Award Compare tool to help all stakeholders in college planning:
The Award Comparison Tool drives systems change in three key ways:
1) Moneythink as the primary affordability, budgeting, and payment tool for low-income and 1st-generation students. Moneythink tools will enable students and their families how to plan for and manage all of their college costs through a healthy mix of grants, scholarships, savings, loans, and work.
2) Moneythink as a central repository at scale. Using predictive analytics by combining institutional outcomes, financial aid, and labor market data, to transform the way students apply to colleges – giving them the best chance to advance along promising career pathways.
3) Moneythink as the aggregator of big data, fueling relevant research & advocacy. Data gives Moneythink unique insight on national trends in college costs that could support wide-scale research and advocacy, facilitate policy advancement, and increase funding to the college affordability space.

Moneythink’s human-centered design principles and solutions

is at the core of the organization’s product development approach, enabling the organization to quickly iterate and build needed solutions to students’ most pressing problems. Four tenets underscore Moneythink’s design process:
1.Meet students where they are.
2.Be personalized, actionable, & timely.
3.Always lead.
4.Don’t give students more work.

Press Features & Recognition

Moneythink has been featured in …

EdSurge, Politico, Buzzfeed, SoundCloud, NGPF Podcast, Huffpost, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Forbes, Financial Literacy Summit, Medium, The Chronicles of Philanthropy, Chicago Tribune, American Banker, Today Show, and Biztech

Moneythink has received the following recognitions...