Coleman D. Ross
Education Course Requirements
or Topics Covered
Master of Arts
Major in Economics
In the long run, we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in the tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean will be flat.
— John Maynard Keynes
[Economics is] not a ‘gay science’, I should say, like some we have heard of, no, a dreary, desolate and, indeed, quite abject and distressing one; what we may call, by way of eminence, the dismal science.
— Thomas Carlyle
Trinity College chapel
photo by Andrew Ross
I enrolled in the Trinity College Master of Arts program in economics in 1999, both because of my interest in higher learning in economics and finance and the quality of Trinity as an institution. While my study was interrupted by returning to work one year later, I resumed my studies at Trinity in 2004 and completed the program with a concentration in corporate finance in May 2006. The program required the completion of ten credit courses for 30 semester hours and an additional three-hour noncredit course. My course work follows:
- Basic Economic Principles (noncredit course)
- Microeconomic Theory
- Macroeconomic Theory
- Financial Accounting Valuation and Measurement
- Corporation Finance
- Portfolio Management
- Analysis of Financial Markets
- Econometrics
- Methods of Research
- Derivative Securities
- Pension and Other Postretirement Benefits: Accounting Myth
and Economic Reality (research project)
Trinity College is accredited by the Commission on Institutions of Higher Education of the New England Association of Schools and Colleges.
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.
As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual value of society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it.
— Adam Smith, Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
Master of Science in Financial Services
Certificate in Financial Asset Management
Certificate in Charitable Planning
One quarter of Americans think that buying lottery tickets is a better retirement plan than saving or investing.
— The New York Times (May 14, 2000)
American College Gregg Conference Center
I enrolled in the Master of Science in Financial Services degree program at the Richard D. Irwin Graduate School of The American College in 2002 while I was still the CFO of The Phoenix, both because of my interest in financial services and the blend of residency courses and independent study courses offered by the college. The program required the completion of twelve credit courses (36 semester hours) and one noncredit course. I completed the program and received my degree in 2008.
While enrolled in The American College’s MSFS program, I also completed the school’s Customized Asset Management and Charitable Planning programs, as well earning its Chartered Advisor in Philanthropy designation. The two certificate programs required me to complete three courses each in asset management and philanthropic issues, or one course beyond the requirements of the MSFS degree program. The Chartered Advisor in Philanthropy designation is described in the Professional Designations section of this website with the Chartered Life Underwriter designation.
Courses for these programs follow:
Master of Science in Financial Services
- Communications and Research (noncredit course)
- Financial Statement Analysis
- Managing the Financial Services Enterprise
- Financial Institutions
- Security Analysis and Portfolio Management
- Retirement Savings Plans for Employees
- Advanced Estate Planning I
- Personal Tax Planning
- Mutual Funds: Analysis, Allocation, and Performance Evaluation
- Ethics and Human Values
- Charitable Giving
- Executive Compensation
- Charitable Giving Applications
Certificate in Financial Asset Management
- Financial Institutions
- Security Analysis and Portfolio Management
- Mutual Funds: Analysis, Allocation,
and Performance Evaluation
Certificate in Charitable Planning
- Charitable Giving
- Charitable Giving Applications
- Charitable Giving: Managing the Tools,
the Applications, and the Relationships
The American College is accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education of the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools.
“Come in!” [said the Professor]
“Only the tailor, Sir, with your little bill,” said a meek voice outside the door.
“Ah, well, I can soon settle this business,” the Professor said to the children, “if you’ll just wait a minute. How much is it, this year, my man?” The tailor had come in while he was speaking.
“Well, it’s been a doubling so many years, you see,” the tailor replied a little gruffly, “and I think I’d like the money now. It’s two thousand pounds, it is!”
“Oh, that’s nothing!” the Professor carelessly remarked, feeling in his pocket, as if he always carried that amount with him. “But wouldn’t you like to wait just another year, and make it four thousand? Just think how rich you’d be! Why you might even be a King, if you liked!”
“I don’t know as I’d care to be a King,” the man said thoughtfully. “But it dew sound a powerful sight o’ money! Well, I think I’ll wait –“
“Of course you will!” said the Professor. There’s good sense in you, I see. Good-day to you, my man!”
“Will you ever have to pay him that four thousand pounds?” [one of the children] asked as the door closed on the departing creditor.
“Never, my child!” the Professor replied emphatically. “He’ll go on doubling it, till he dies. You see it’s always worth while waiting another year, to get twice as much money!”
— Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno
Bachelor of Science in Business Administration
Major in Accounting
I had never been east of Winston-Salem when I first got here.
I was so homesick, I could die.
— Andy Griffith (UNC Class of 1949)
Coleman D. Ross
Class of 1965
I received a BSBA degree with a major in accounting in 1965, notwithstanding my initial reluctant to study accounting. My father, who had died during my senior year in high school, and my brother were both accountants and I wanted to establish my own, separate identity. Furthermore, the UNC accounting degree program required an additional semester of course work beyond the normal business degree program and cost was a factor, as I was paying for my own education. Despite my need to establish my own identity and the cost of additional study, it became obvious to me that accounting was the right field for me and I completed the additional five courses by attending summer school.
1965 UNC Delta Sigma Pi chapter members
I benefited greatly from the accounting education that I received from UNC. I benefited even more from my financial and leadership responsibilities. I worked at part-time jobs during the school terms and also worked at a full-time job on school breaks. With these jobs and loans from an aunt, I ultimately paid all of the costs of my undergraduate education. I was also active in Delta Sigma Pi business fraternity and was President of the chapter in my senior year. These financial and leadership responsibilities were as important as academics in defining me and laying the foundation for my subsequent careers.
My BSBA degree required the completion of 46 courses and 140 semester hours, including ten accounting courses, seven economics and finance courses, two law courses, and six other business administration courses in areas of management, marketing, and human resource administration. In 1967, I also completed yet another undergraduate accounting course at the University of South Florida, which was a specific requirement for me to obtain a Florida CPA license. My undergraduate Business Administration course work follows:
Accounting courses
- Elementary Accounting Principles
- Intermediate Accounting Principles
- Advanced Accounting Principles
- Advanced Accounting Problems
- Cost Accounting
- Accounting Theory
- Auditing
- Federal and State Income Taxation for Individuals
- Federal and State Income Taxation for Partnerships and Corporations
- Certified Public Accounting Problems
- Governmental Institution Accounting (University of South Florida)
Law and Other Business Administration courses
- Business Law
- Credit Transactions and Sales
- Principles of Management
- Management Controls
- Personnel Relations
- Principles of Marketing
- Operations Research
- Management Simulation
Economics and Finance courses
- Microeconomics
- Macroeconomics
- Statistics
- Money and Banking
- Business Finance
- Cases in Business Finance
- Government and Business
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is accredited by the Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.
The University of North Carolina is a special place. For most of us, it was a place of self-realization and personal development and we hold precious and dear memories of those very happy years. We learned, we grew, and later we understood that we must give back to society the best within us to improve the well-being of those less fortunate about us….
— William C. Friday (UNC Law School Class
of 1948
and President of The University of North Carolina)
High School Diploma
A person's character traits are not developed in isolation, but within and by the communities to which he belongs
— Aristotle
Coleman D. Ross
Class of 1961
Pleasant Garden School Auditorium
painting by Sandra Melvin Gray, PGHS Class of 1961
click on thumbnail to open Sandra Melvin Gray's website
I was born and raised in Pleasant Garden, North Carolina, where I attended Pleasant Garden School for 12 years. I took college preparatory courses at Pleasant Garden High School (now Southeast Guilford High School), was a member of the Beta Club, the school’s honor society, and graduated third in my class of 61 students.
I also participated in basketball and track, as well the high school chorus. I played basketball all four years and was a distance runner on the track team my final two years. In 1960, I finished in first place in the 880 yard (half-mile) run in the Guilford County Track and Field Championship Meet. In addition to the high school chorus, I also sang in the statewide North Carolina Choral Festival. Following my high school junior year, I was one of two participants from my school in North Carolina Boys’ State, a week-long, statewide program held in Chapel Hill at UNC. In my senior year of high school, I received the Civitan Award from the Civitan Club of Greensboro, being voted by my fellow high school students as the best citizen in the senior class.
Certificate of Director Education
In support of my role as an independent director, I completed the National Association of Corporate Directors’ two-day Certificate of Director Education program in June 2008. To maintain this certificate, I am required to complete at least 16 hours of approved continuing director’s education during each succeeding two-year period. The NACD is the membership organization dedicated to serving the corporate governance needs of corporate directors and boards. The organization’s professionalism course that I completed covered the following curriculum topics:
- Board excellence: roles, responsibilities, structure, and leadership
- Fiduciary duties of corporate boards
- Scrutinizing financial statements: knowing what questions to ask management and auditors
- Creating and sustaining board value: corporate strategy and risk oversight
- Board governance and the role of the Governance and Nominating Committee
- Audit Committees: effectiveness in the new environment
- Executive and director compensation in the changing landscape
- A case study on risk management
The long-recognized challenge, of course, is that the interests of management are not always completely aligned with those of the shareholders. In 1776, Adam Smith wrote about the agency problem of management in the Wealth of Nations: when it comes to money, he said, managers “cannot well be expected that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private [partnership] frequently watch over their own”. There, “negligence and profusion must always prevail, more or less, in the management of the affairs of such a company”. In the face of such potential for managers’ conflicts of interest, directors must guard the interests of shareholders and ensure that managers do their jobs. They also must perform an extremely important advisory role to management. The widespread dispersion of ownership in a modern corporation makes the role of directors all the more important.
— SEC Commissioner Paul S. Adkins,
“Remarks at the Corporate Directors Forum”,
January 22, 2007
Advanced Management Program
We wander with nostalgia down the old brick paths, across the still green grasses, beneath the poplars and along the stone walls we can never forget, and whisper to one another, "I don’t recognize the place".
— Sam J. Ervin (UNC Class of 1917 and U.S. Senator from North Carolina)
The University of North Carolina, South Building
photo by Andrew Ross
I completed the University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School Advanced Management Program in 1994. Price Waterhouse provided executive education opportunities to practice leaders and nominated me for the program because of my leadership role with the firm's insurance practice and my concurrent role as the engagement partner for the recently demutualized The Equitable Companies. I was pleased to have this opportunity to return to Chapel Hill and participate. The program, now called the Senior Executives Institute, involved four one-week sessions over four months and focused on leadership and management, covering the following topics:
- Financial Accounting
- Activity Based Cost Accounting
- International Business
- Shareholder Value Creation
- Strategic Information Systems
- Strategy Implementation
- Management Simulation
- Life-long Goal Setting
- Team Building
- Leadership Philosophy and Challenges
- Leadership Styles
- Global Strategy Development
- Marketing Strategy
- Operations Management
- High Performance Workplace Creation
[There are] also some useful management lessons to be learned … particularly how to survive under stress…. I [recall] a quotation used by Albert Camus: “the dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.” In conversations and communications with Equitable people, I sought to portray these almost daily irritations [media sniping, credit-rating agencies’ threatened downgrades, regulators’ delays, and competitors’ bashing] as being akin to jackals snapping at the heels of the camels in the caravan. The important point is not to let the caravan stop and try to fight it out with the dogs. Rather one must keep the caravan moving. I reminded our people that we knew precisely where our caravan was going – to the promised land of demutualization with an oasis containing [capital] at which we could refuel and quench our thirst. We just had to keep the caravan moving and not slow down.
— Richard H. Jenrette
(UNC Class of 1951
and Retired CEO, The Equitable Companies)
Jenrette: The Contrarian Manager
Advanced Diploma in Insurance
Lloyd's Building, One Lime Street, London
photo from Lloyd's of London
I enrolled in the Chartered Insurance Institute's Advanced Diploma in Insurance program when I was the chief financial officer of Trenwick Group and also on the board of directors of its Lloyd's of London syndicate manager. The Chartered Insurance Institute, also based in London, is a professional organization for the insurance and financial services industry. I received my diploma in 2005 after completing examination requirements in the following subjects:
- Principles of Reinsurance
- Management
- Marketing
- Finance and Accounting
- North American General
Insurance Principles
- Risk, Regulation, and Capital Adequacy
- Company and Contract Law and
Their Application to Insurance - Business and Economics
- Principles of Property and Pecuniary Insurance
One afternoon in 1637 … a Cretan scholar named Canopius sat down in his chambers at Balliol College, Oxford, and made himself a strong cup of coffee. Canopius's brew is believed to mark the first time coffee was drunk in England; it proved so popular when it was offered to the public that hundreds of coffee houses were soon in operation all over London….
The coffee house that Edward Lloyd opened in 1687 near the Thames on Tower Street was a favorite haunt of men from ships that moored at London's docks…. [Lloyd] was a lot more than a skilled coffee-house host. Recognizing the value of his customer base and responding to the insistent demand for information, he launched "Lloyd's List" in 1696 and filled it with information on the arrival and departure of ships and intelligence on conditions abroad and at sea…. One corner [of his coffee house] was reserved for ships' captains where they could compare notes on the hazards of the new routes that were opening up….
Then, as now, anyone who was seeking insurance would go to a broker, who would then hawk the risk to individual risk-takers who gathered in the coffee houses or in the precincts of the Royal Exchange. When a deal was closed, the risk-taker would confirm his agreement to cover the loss in return for a specified premium by writing his name under the terms of the contract; soon these one-man insurance operators came to be known as "underwriters"…. Lloyd's coffee house served from the start as the headquarters for marine underwriters, in large part because of its excellent mercantile and shipping connections….
In 1771, nearly a hundred years after Edward Lloyd opened his coffee house on Tower Street, seventy-nine of the underwriters who did business at Lloyd's subscribed £100 each and joined together in the Society of Lloyd's, an unincorporated group of individual entrepreneurs operating under a self-regulated code of behavior. These were the original Members of Lloyd's; later, members came to be known as "Names". The Names committed all their worldly possessions and all their financial capital to secure their promise to make good on their customers' losses. That reason was one of the principal reasons for the rapid growth of business underwritten at Lloyd's over the years. And thus did Canopius's cup of coffee lead to the establishment of the most famous insurance company in history.
— Peter L. Bernstein, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk
Graduate School of Banking Certificate
LSU's Memorial Tower
photo from Wikipedia
I enrolled in the banking program at the Graduate School of Banking (then the School of Banking of the South) in 1982 at a time when banking was as much a part of my client base as insurance. Virtually all of my classmates there were bankers, which made for some interesting discussions around financial statements, credit analysis, and independent auditors’ reports. The program required attendance and participation at three annual two week on-campus sessions in Baton Rouge with independent projects between years. I graduated from the program in 1984. The topics covered by the program included the following:
- Profit Planning
- Product Pricing
- Consumer Credit
- Real Estate Financing
- Special Banking Issues
- Banking Simulation
- Economics
- Investments
- Credit Analysis
- Marketing
- Law
- Management
There are some who would argue that the role of the bank supervisor is to minimize or even eliminate bank failure, but this view is mistaken, in my judgment. The willingness to take risk is essential to the growth of a free market, capitalist economy…. [I]f all savers and their financial intermediaries invested only in risk-free assets, the potential for business growth would never be realized.
— U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan
Certificate in General Insurance
The Program in General Insurance of the Insurance Institute of America, a companion organization to the American Institute of Chartered Property Casualty Underwriters, covers insurance principles, practices, and policies. I completed the program in 1998 while serving as the engagement partner for XL Capital and Trenwick Group. In a similar timeframe, I also completed the Chartered Property Casualty Underwriter and Associate in Insurance Accounting and Finance designations, which are described in the Professional Designations section. The subjects of the three examinations that I completed for the Certificate of General Insurance follow:
- General Insurance Principles
- Personal Insurance
- Commercial Insurance
Far away from the gambling tables, the managers of insurance companies conduct their affairs in the same fashion [as gamblers]. They set their premiums to cover the losses they will suffer in the long run; but when earthquakes and fires and hurricanes all happen at about the same time, the short run can be very painful. Unlike gamblers, insurance companies carry capital and put aside reserves to tide them over during the inevitable sequences of short runs of bad luck.
— Peter L. Bernstein, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk
photos courtesy of Andrew Ross, Lloyd's of London, and Wikipedia