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Minor
Read an organization’s numbers to understand what something truly costs, whether it pays for itself and where the money should go.
The financial management minor at Goshen College is an 18-credit undergraduate minor that builds the skill to understand numbers from the ground up. You’ll learn to read financial statements and understand what they say about how an organization is really performing. You’ll learn cost analysis by finding the true cost of a product, a program, or a decision, which is rarely the number on the invoice. You’ll learn to evaluate opportunities and make capital decisions you can defend. And you’ll build the spreadsheet fluency the work actually runs on.
You don’t need prior coursework or a business background. The minor starts at the beginning and is open to students in any major. You declare it with your academic advisor.
Financial management minors learn to ask who the numbers really affect and why they matter to an organization. A Goshen College student understands that financial decisions ultimately impact people. A cost cut is somebody’s paycheck, a funding decision determines whether a community program runs an after school program or shuts its doors. An investment is capital pointed at one future instead of another. In our classes, it’s built into how the work is taught, because it’s built into what this college believes about stewardship, responsibility and the communities we’re accountable to. Ethics, sustainability and stakeholder engagement aren’t a separate unit here. They’re part of what it means to do the analysis well.
The minor is eighteen credits, and if you’re already studying business or accounting, a good portion overlaps with coursework you’re taking anyway. Ask your advisor to map it against your plan. If you’re not in this department, it’s still one of the most straightforward minors on campus to fit in. One main benefit of pursuing this minor is that financial fluency travels. It works anywhere you go next, in any sector and any currency.
Accounting taught me to report what happened and analyze the results. Financial management taught me to decide what happens next — valuation, capital budgeting, whether a project is worth doing at all.
Mohammad Saif Ansari '25
Assurance Analyst at EY
Scholarships make up a large portion of Goshen financial aid packages, which average almost $26,000 per student, not counting work-study or loans. Enrolled business students may also qualify for endowed awards including the Sauder Scholarship and the Gorsline Scholarship.
To see your own price after aid, run the net price calculator, or explore your options at the financial aid and scholarships pages.
Yes. Financial Management is not one of the Business major’s four concentrations, which are Data and Systems Management, Healthcare Management, Operations Management, and People and Culture Management. Nothing blocks a business major from earning it.
This minor has the heaviest overlap of the business minors, so the honest answer is that it may add very little. The business core already includes Principles of Accounting and Spreadsheet Skills. An Operations Management concentration adds Cost Accounting, Financial Management, and your Operations or Supply Chain course, which between them can leave Investing in Capital Markets as the only course you have not already taken.
Accounting majors have a specific rule. If you are an accounting major earning this minor, you must complete both BUS 318 Operations Management and BUS 312 Supply Chain Management rather than choosing one, which makes the minor seven courses instead of six.
Whether a single course can count toward both your major and this minor is a question for your advisor and the registrar. Given how much overlap there is here, get that answer before you declare.
18 credit hours, six three-credit courses. Three things decide how that actually lands in your schedule:
Accounting and business are the obvious pairs, though both come with so much overlap that the question becomes whether the minor adds enough to be worth declaring. See the question above.
It pairs best with a major that will eventually put you on the money side of an organization: agriculture and sustainability, nursing and the health sciences, sport management, communication and nonprofit work, computer science, and the arts if you expect to run a studio or a practice rather than work inside someone else’s.
This is also the most quantitative of the business minors. If you like working in spreadsheets and models and want that to be a real credential rather than a skill you mention in an interview, this is the one that says so.
You’ll be able to use accounting, finance and cost-analysis tools to evaluate how an organization is performing and inform real management decisions. You’ll be able to apply quantitative models to weigh investment opportunities and make capital allocation decisions. In practice, you’ll read the numbers behind real decisions, act on them and explain your reasoning to people who need to trust it.
Scholarships make up a large portion of Goshen financial aid packages, which average almost $26,000 per student, not counting work-study or loans. Enrolled business students may also qualify for endowed awards including the Sauder Scholarship and the Gorsline Scholarship. Run the net price calculator to see your own number, then talk it through with a real person in the financial aid office.
Associate Professor of Business
Assistant Professor of Business
Professor of Accounting
Program Director
Department Chair
Assistant Professor of Business
Assistant Professor of Information Technology
Professor of Economics
Carl Kreider Chair and Co-Director of Global Engagement
Associate Professor of Business
Professor of Accounting
