Financial Skills and Gender Difference on College Students

This work focused on determining if there is a difference in the level of financial skills that college students have in programs in the economic-administrative area: Public Accounting, Business Administration, Accounting and Finance, Actuary, Markets and International Business, as well as Engineering: in Business, Industrial, Mechanical and Mechatronic Management. All this according to gender and the type of educational institution in where, they are enrolled. To obtain the data, we build the hybrid instrument from the scales proposed by: Mandell and Kline (2009); Lusardi and Mitchell (2008, 2011); CFI Official Global Provider of the Financial Modeling and Valuation Analyst (FMVA)TM Certification Program (2015); Technological of Costa Rica (TEC) (2016-2017) and LearningExpress (2017). The test was applied virtually to university students, where the participation of 309 students was achieved, from seven municipalities in the state of Veracruz: Acayucan, Alvarado, Banderilla, Boca del Rio, Martinez de la Torre, San Andres Tuxtla, Veracruz Puerto, enrolled in 10 Higher Education Institutions, three are public institutions and seven are private. For data analysis, the non-parametric Kruskal-Wallis test to detect the existence of differences by gender was used. The results indicate that the level of financial ability of the respondents does not differ in relation to gender and educational institution.