Ethics education in financial planning courses

18 May 2018

FPRJ

The Financial Planning Research Journal (FPRJ) aims to publish original, scholarly peer reviewed articles from a wide variety of personal finance and investment disciplines.

An article published in the Financial Planning Research Journal (Volume 4, Issue 1) investigates the current climate of ethics education across FPA accredited degrees in Australia.

Through research analyses of the publicly available curriculum data of 11 institutions offering FPA accredited bachelor and postgraduate degrees listed in the ‘CFP Certification Program: Approved Degree List’ (October 2016), we have been able to determine the extent that ethics have been incorporated in these degrees.

Such degrees have been accredited as meeting the Financial Planning Education Council (FPEC) curriculum requirements that have now been adopted by the Financial Adviser Standards and Ethics Authority (FASEA) and have achieved FPA approval; an accolade and benchmark within the industry.

To hold an FPA approved degree, universities must adhere to a strict set of teaching and delivery guidelines.

Curriculum data of 279 undergraduate units and 80 postgraduate units across 17 courses was analysed and a total of 55 units were found to incorporate ethics.

The bachelor degrees have on average 3.55 units with ethics (14.8 per cent of a standard 24-unit degree with ethics), while on average, 19.1 per cent of the postgraduate degrees were inclusive of ethics, greater than that of bachelor degrees.

Based on publicly available information for approved bachelor degrees, Western Sydney University and the University of Sunshine Coast possess the most units (7) with ethics incorporated, while the University of New South Wales possesses the most units with ethics (6) across approved postgraduate degrees. There was one university found to have no evidence of ethics included in any units of its course.

Six major levels of learning

For units found to incorporate ethics, the learning outcomes and learning activities were compared against Bloom’s taxonomy (Anderson et al., 2001) to reveal the extent to which the learning of ethics was promoted at a superficial or in-depth level.

The taxonomy has been used in closely related disciplines, such as accounting and economics, and consists of six major levels of learning; remember, understand, apply, analyse, evaluate, and create. ‘Remember’ is at the surface level of learning, which gradually progresses to a deep level of learning – ‘create’.

Only two ethics related learning outcomes from all accredited financial planning courses in Australia were found to be at the deepest level of learning. The findings also revealed that a number of programs did not strictly comply with the FPEC guidelines.

Teaching ethics comes with challenges

The authors acknowledge the challenges of teaching ethics, citing the lack of resources (both educational and financial), lack of time in the program, resistance from students and/or staff, and staff not qualified or confident in teaching ethics.

The authors also reviewed a number of different approaches to teaching ethics and suggest that a shift from subject orientated learning to learning through responding to real-life problems faced by the financial planning profession (such as using dilemmas that financial planners will encounter in the workplace) is needed.

These findings suggest there is much room for improvement when it comes to ethics education in financial planning degrees. Determining whether someone is merely aware of ethics or actually engaging in ethical practices poses a challenge for educators and the profession.

However, by incorporating ethics in the curriculum at a high level on Bloom’s taxonomy that allows for a deep level of learning, students gain awareness of ethical issues and develop the ability to formulate and justify a moral stance.

This study proves valuable in highlighting gaps within the current climate of ethics education in accredited financial planning courses in Australia.

Through ethics education, institutions hold a responsibility to prepare future financial planners to serve in the best interests of their clients and make a positive contribution to society.

This report was published in the ‘Financial Planning Research Journal’ (Vol 4, Issue 1, 2018). To read the report in full, go to: fpa.com.au/education/financial-planning-research-journal/

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