Building an Expert Financial Literacy Platform for College Students
\ CASE STUDY
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH
“Today's students just don't understand the way money works. No one taught it to them in high school. No one taught it to them in college, and that is a big mistake for this country. We're going to help them.”
— Dan Rosenzweig, CEO, Chegg
Background
Chegg Inc. is an American education technology company built to make education more affordable and accessible. Serving primarily high school and college students, Chegg's platform offers textbook rentals, homework help, online tutoring, scholarship matching, and internship search, reaching more than 50 million students monthly. Through that reach, Chegg became one of the most trusted names in student support.
Despite that scale, Chegg recognized a critical gap in what it offered: millions of students were entering college and adulthood with little to no personal finance knowledge. They had questions about student loans, credit, budgeting, and financial planning, but nowhere trusted to turn for quick, relevant answers. The financial resources that existed online weren't designed for students, and students knew it.
Chegg CEO Dan Rosenzweig engaged C\R Strategy Partners and author Jean Chatzky to close that gap. Working together, they designed and built Chegg Money: an expert financial literacy question-and-answer application integrated directly into the Chegg platform, putting the answers students needed at the exact moment they needed them.
The Challenge
Four problems had to be solved to build a financial literacy product students would actually use:
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No trusted financial resource at the point of need: Students couldn't easily find answers to financial questions when they arose, and didn't trust the financial websites that did exist. The product had to deliver expert answers at the exact moment students had a question, not after a lengthy search.
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Content relevance gap: Existing financial resources weren't built around students' real experiences or questions. To earn student engagement, the content had to feel directly applicable to their lives.
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Building credible, trustworthy content at scale: Creating 1,000+ answers students could trust required independent financial journalists and subject-matter experts, matched to the moments and questions most relevant to college and early adult life.
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Native integration into the Chegg platform: Chegg Money had to be designed and built to live seamlessly inside Chegg's existing platform without disrupting the core experience.
Our Approach
C\R Strategy Partners applied its Aligned Innovation framework to design and build Chegg Money. Four phases shaped the engagement:
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Research – Conduct direct research with students to identify point-of-need financial behaviors and test prototypes to determine engagement patterns, revealing that students want quick, expert answers at the exact moment they have a financial question.
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Content – Create 1,000 Money Moments: expert answers to the most common financial questions college students face, structured as a Q&A with chat-like design, definition hover states, and embedded financial tools that feel native to students' digital lives.
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Build – Manage platform development to build an experience students will love, including Questions People Ask Next to deepen engagement and integrated financial calculators to provide concrete support at the moment of need.
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Launch – Launch Chegg Money inside the Chegg platform, reaching over 50 million monthly student visitors, and establish the foundation for Chegg's continued financial literacy commitment through Chegg Life.
Learning & Outcomes
Chegg Money gave students something that hadn't existed before, a trusted source of financial expertise built around their questions, their lives, and the moments that mattered:
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1,000 Money Moments: Expert answers to over 1,000 financial questions college students face, organized in a quick Q&A format that met students at their point of need rather than asking them to wade through lengthy resources.
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Trusted expert content: Relationships with independent financial journalists and peer voices produced short text and video content and simple financial tools that students could trust.
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"Questions People Ask Next": A purposeful feature that nudged students deeper into the knowledge base after their initial question was answered.
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Embedded financial tools: Practical calculators placed alongside money moment answers gave students concrete, actionable support for their most pressing financial decisions at the exact moment they needed it.
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Student-centered design: Chat-like design elements, definition hover states, and visual breaks gave the platform a modern, intuitive experience distinct from traditional financial websites.
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Chegg Life expansion: Chegg continued its financial literacy commitment by launching Chegg Life, a real-world guide to help students through life's many transitions, demonstrating the platform's scalability and Chegg's sustained investment in student success.
The Results
Chegg Money launched as a fully integrated, expert-driven product, and proved that financial literacy could be built into an experience students already used and trusted:
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Chegg Money launched inside the Chegg platform: A fully integrated expert financial literacy product was researched, designed, built, and launched, reaching over 50 million monthly student visitors inside the platform they already trusted.
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Over 1,000 financial questions answered: The platform launched with expert answers to more than 1,000 commonly asked financial questions, covering 25+ money moments across the full arc of college and early-adult life.
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Three core student barriers directly addressed: The product resolved the three barriers students faced: inability to find answers at the point of need, distrust of existing financial resources, and lack of relevance to their own experience, in a single, integrated platform.
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Foundation for continued financial literacy expansion: Chegg built on Chegg Money's success by launching Chegg Life, extending its commitment to student financial literacy and demonstrating the approach's scalability across the platform.
Chegg Money put expert financial guidance where college students already were: inside the platform they trusted, at the exact moment they needed it.