Finance

Finance develops analytical reasoning through formal modeling, empirical testing, cash flow analyses, and historical-institutional interpretations. Finance majors gain training for strategic management and leadership; along with strong preparation for graduate study in Finance, Economics, Law, or MBA programs. The knowledge and skills developed are utilized in problem solving, executive decision-making, and policy applications in business, regulation, internal compliance, banking, investment, and not-for-profit organizations. Thus, the Finance major prepares students for interesting careers as well as for further graduate work. Oral and written communication is especially important in course work; together with mathematical, empirical, graphical, and data-presentation software and skills.

Faculties are committed to modeling and encouraging the development of honesty, integrity, and virtue in our students. Our hope is to provide an atmosphere of learning and study that will, in keeping with the highest values of a Catholic and Benedictine education for humane stewardship, enable young men and women to live a life that will help to make the world a better place.

Robert J. Shiller, a 2013 Nobel Laureate, elaborates eloquently of finance grounding in some objective good: “The very word finance actually derives from a classical Latin term for ‘goal’ … There is a fundamental concept of symmetry implicit in the concept of market efficiency. This is the idea, fundamental to financial theory, that prices in different markets are just manifestations of a deep underlying truth … small price changes amounts to a result that is not random but that instead provides discovery of true economic value.”

Graduates of Finance tend to work as financial analysts or managers in corporations, commercial banks, investment banks, insurance companies, brokerage firms, and pension funds.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports overall mean annual salary—encompassing the range of entry-level and senior-level experience—for all Finance Managers to be almost $150,000.