Dollars and sense.

FROM SALES PITCHES FOR "V1@GRA" TO PLEAS FOR HELP TRANSFERring funds by the son of a former leader of an African country who was killed by his enemies, our in-boxes are full of spam mail.

But there's one e-mail message that people are reading. It's the "Financial Tip of the Week" from the University of Missouri-Columbia's Office for Financial Success. Written by OFS Director Mark Oleson, the messages are directed to students who have little experience with personal finance. The e-mail offers tips on eliminating debt, opting out of solicitations, negotiating a lower credit-card-rate, and understanding changes to student loan legislation. Oleson started writing the weekly tips six-and-a-half years ago when he was at Iowa State. The project is intended to give students unbiased, personalized information. More students will drop out of college for financial reasons than academic reasons, he notes. "I wanted to inform students about the available financial counseling services. If someone didn't know about it and could have benefited from it, that bothers me," he says.

The "Financial Tip of the Week" e-mail has grown to more than 43,000 subscribers nationwide, and it now has a companion blog (www.financialtip.blogspot.com), launched last August. "We were getting complaints from our 'computer people' about the large size of the e-mails and they asked us to use an outside service to disseminate our tip; thus was the birth of the blog," Oleson says.

Other schools may soon be following Oleson's lead. He says he's had inquiries from Northern Colorado University, the University of Alabama-Birmingham, Columbia College and DePaul University (Ill.) about the program.