Associate Professor of Business
Bachelor of Arts
Staging - Financial Management (V2)
Minor
At Goshen College, this is Financial Management…
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.
Why Study Financial Management at Goshen College?
You learn the same financial tools you’d learn anywhere. The difference? you learn to ask who the numbers really affect and why they matter.
Financial decisions land on people. A cost cut is somebody’s hours. An allocation decision is a program that runs or doesn’t. An investment is capital pointed at one future instead of another. At Goshen, that’s not a footnote at the end of the semester, 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.
You’ll learn to build the model and to interrogate it. Who bears the cost that isn’t on the balance sheet? What does this decision do to the people downstream from it, the community around it and the world it draws from? Ethics, sustainability and stakeholder engagement aren’t a separate unit here. They’re part of what it means to do the analysis well.
That combination is rarer than it should be, and it’s increasingly what employers, boards and communities are looking for: someone who can run the numbers and be trusted to understand what they are for.
What sets it apart
- Finance taught as stewardship. You learn the standard tools, and you learn to account for the people and communities a decision touches — not as a caveat, but as part of doing the analysis right.
- It goes with whatever you’re studying. Musicians who can budget a tour. Scientists who can write a grant. Educators who can read a district budget. Artists who can price their work. Financial fluency makes every other skill more usable.
- A short, plannable addition. 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, it’s still one of the most straightforward minors on campus to fit in.
- Faculty who know your name. In classes this size, the professor grading your cost analysis is the one who’ll write your recommendation letter. You’ll be pushed, and you’ll be known.
Financial fluency travels. It works in Goshen and it works anywhere you go next, in any sector and any currency. Whatever you end up building — a company, a department, a ministry, a career — you’ll be the person who can tell whether the numbers hold up, and whether they should.
Common Questions About the Financial Management Minor
No. The minor starts from the beginning, and students come to it from every part of campus such as the arts, the sciences, education, ministry and health. At its core, you will be taught to think carefully.
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:
- Two courses come first. ACC 200 Principles of Accounting and BUS 220 Spreadsheet Skills are prerequisites for both ACC 301 Cost Accounting and BUS 317 Financial Management. Plan on at least two stages, not one.
- The choice at the end is not an even one. BUS 312 Supply Chain Management requires BUS 318 Operations Management first, so choosing Supply Chain means taking two courses where Operations Management alone would take one. If you are counting credits, BUS 318 is the shorter route.
- Accounting majors take both BUS 318 and BUS 312, so the minor runs to seven courses and 21 credits.
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.
Jason Harrison
Assistant Professor of Business
Andrew Hartzler
Professor of Accounting
Michelle Horning
Professor of Accounting
Program Director
Department ChairAlysha Liljeqvist
Associate Professor of Business
Jorge Montenegro Martinez
Assistant Professor of Business
Jerrell Richer
Professor of Economics
Carl Kreider Chair and Co-Director of Global EngagementEyob Zeleke
Assistant Professor of Information Technology
