Abstract

Recently, considerable concern has arisen over the complex financial markets, which are inclined to require more individual responsibility. Accordingly, students have to bear more responsibility for their financial management. Nevertheless, in a sluggish economy with high unemployment, the commercial events during the last decade have rendered the transition into financial independence more challenging for social freshmen. In addition, some statistical information has revealed the negative outgrowth that occurred in the wake of student loans and the reduction of beginning salaries. Given the aforementioned hidden risks of finance and the importance of money management, we thus endeavored to investigate the factors students consider when choosing financial tools. For the sake of providing students with information for reference, we delivered a similar questionnaire to professionals in the field. We used the received data to examine the gap between experts’ views and students’ perceptions and then inferred possible reasons for the comparison results.The AHP serves as the chief instrument for calculating relative importance and weighting the significance of the factors. We sent the questionnaires to 140 college students at National Chiayi University and 20 professionals in the financial field and 20 professionals in financial field. The general results indicate that opinions differ among individual students, and opinions of students are rather different from those of the experts; thus, we propose that financial institutions should take different opinions into consideration when designing their financial products.

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