Students entering college may not have the financial knowledge and competency needed to completely understand the loans they are signing up for when committing to student financial aid. The purpose of this qualitative case study is to examine the level of financial knowledge that first-year college students have when taking out college loans. This case study examined whether this generation of students has the financial literacy levels of past generations and whether they understand the financial challenges they will face later in life. One-on-one, semi-structured interviews were conducted, and voice recorded with 37 freshman college students in Zoom meetings achieving saturation. When all interviews were competed the audio recordings were transcribed manually by the researcher then used to triangulate as well as perform a thematic analysis. All data gathered from willing participants were carefully analyzed manually along with the help of NVivo 12 software to identify emerging themes. Data analysis research has shown that this generation of college graduates possesses large amounts of student loans and are failing to pay these loans back at an alarming rate. Students lack financial knowledge as well as experience and are not adequately prepared to understand basic loan requirements along with what their responsibilities are as borrowers. A recent study on financial literacy and other related outcomes found that financial literacy is more important than ever before because of the complexity of today's financial aid loans. Young adults do not have the financial capacity or skills to understand the actual costs of the loans they are signing up for. A better understanding of finance will benefit them in choosing the college that is affordable, knowing that their career in the future will provide the income necessary to pay back these loans. Additional research is necessary to determine the age at which financial literacy education should be taught in schools in the future. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]