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April 12, 2013 at 06:35 AM
“We’re in the business of managing expectations,” says Deena Katz of what advisors do for a living—and it’s a living, she argues, that more college-age people should consider pursuing.
Katz (left), who with her partner Harold Evensky runs the wealth management firm Evensky & Katz, is expending more of her seemingly boundless energy and passion these days as an associate professor in Texas Tech University’s Personal Financial Planning program.
She’s also an evangelist not just for Texas Tech’s program, but for the many similar programs at colleges and universities around the nation. Those academic programs teach students the theory of financial planning, but in the tradition of tech schools, there’s a clear practical bent to the curriculum.
While the intellectual return of such programs may be gratifying to academically minded students, there’s a career benefit as well: graduates of these programs are almost guaranteed a job, she says. At Texas Tech, 95% of graduates get a job in the field, while the remainder, Katz joked with a nod to Texas, “go to work for their father’s oil company.”
While Katz has been teaching and preaching on the topic for some years now, and has welcomed Evensky to the Texas Tech faculty, it appears that much of the rest of the industry is catching up with what she discovered years ago.
