These days, Todd Saville’s commute looks a little different. He walks to work, bikes to town, and spends his days alongside colleagues at the Zealand – Academy of Technologies and Business, Kirkwood Community College’s longtime educational partner in Denmark.
Saville isn’t there with his students. Rather, he’s a student of sorts, living and working as a Fulbright scholar during the final months of a Kirkwood career that will end with his retirement in December.
“What started early in my academic career at Kirkwood with leading a short-term study abroad experience to Denmark has come full circle with a Fulbright scholarship project back in the same country,” Saville said. “I call that poetic beauty.”
A professor and program coordinator for Kirkwood’s Financial Services program, Saville didn’t originally plan to teach. He spent 13 years in industry — in community relations, training, global marketing, sales, financial advising, and consulting — before an adjunct position at Mount Mercy University placed him in front of a classroom. He immediately knew education was his future.
“I taught two years as a part-time adjunct when the full-time faculty position at Kirkwood appeared,” Saville said. “I took the leap of faith in pursuing it. It was the best career move I ever made.”
That was the fall of 2006. Saville, who has a bachelor’s degree in Communication and Media Studies from the University of Northern Iowa and an MBA from Nova Southeastern University, has been at Kirkwood ever since.
“Todd exemplifies the very best of Kirkwood faculty,” said Tamara Alt, dean of Kirkwood’s Business and Information Technology Department. “Throughout his career, he has consistently challenged students to think beyond the classroom by connecting them to real-world experiences, international perspectives, and meaningful career pathways.”
Over the years, Saville has taken students to the Federal Reserve banks in Chicago and St. Louis, to Warren Buffett’s shareholder meeting in Omaha, and on study abroad trips to Denmark, England, Australia, and France.
“It’s a lot of planning, a lot of recruiting, and a lot of executing,” he said. “It’s not easy, but for the students who go, it’s often a life-changing experience.”
Take the 2011 class trip to the Federal Reserve Bank in Chicago. Saville and his students ran headlong into an Occupy Chicago demonstration, three years after the 2008 financial crisis.
“It was a shocking and searing experience for all of us, something you’d never fully grasp from a textbook, lecture, news feed headline, or video,” Saville said.
That belief in experience over theory eventually became a research question. After more than two decades of teaching personal finance alongside sales and marketing, Saville kept seeing the same tension: marketing encourages consumption, while personal finance emphasizes saving and restraint. Both messages land on the same students.
His 2025 – ’26 Endowed Faculty Chair project, “Mindful Money Matters in a Mass-Consumption Culture,” grew out of that contradiction, drawing on behavioral economics, psychology, and cultural history to examine why people make the financial decisions they do.
“Despite unprecedented access to financial information, many Americans continue to struggle with debt, overspending, financial stress, and long-term financial insecurity,” Saville said. “Is the problem one of financial literacy — not knowing what to do — or financial responsibility — not doing what you already know you should?”
The project soon raised another question: Could Saville take that research beyond Kirkwood? He reached out to longtime friend Ole Kolling, director of international relations and programs at the Zealand school, to ask if it was a good fit for a Fulbright scholarship. Kolling thought it was. So did Alt and Dawn Wood, dean of Global Learning and Kirkwood’s Fulbright liaison.
“Being named a Fulbright scholar is a well-deserved recognition of his commitment to lifelong learning, global engagement, and educational innovation,” Alt said.
Saville’s Fulbright adds to Kirkwood’s growing history with the program. According to Wood, three Kirkwood faculty members, including Saville, have received Fulbright U.S. Scholar awards over the past decade, and the college has hosted international Fulbright recipients on campus. Kirkwood’s partnership with the Zealand school goes back more than 20 years.
“When our faculty engage with colleagues around the world, they bring new perspectives, ideas, and connections back to our students and our local workforce,” Wood said.
Saville arrived in Denmark on Aug. 10 and will return to Iowa at the beginning of January. In the meantime, he’s adjusting — culturally, professionally, and personally.
“There’s an abundance of kindness and consideration here,” he said. “Collaboration is a given. Flexibility, open discussion and sometimes debate are healthy and productive and fun. To me, the Danish way is a delight.”
He’s especially taken with what he calls two unofficial financial concepts: “enough” and “more.”
“Many Danes seem to live more fulfilled lives with less,” he said, “whereas in the U.S. we are often conditioned to consume more and are led to believe it is never enough.”
Saville knows those differences aren’t simply a matter of personal choice. Denmark’s publicly funded education and healthcare, along with its strong pension system, shape how people think about financial security. His research looks beyond those structures to the cultural values young adults hold toward wealth and spending. Those observations are now central to workshops he is developing as part of his Fulbright project.
For Saville, though, the most meaningful measure of his work is what happens after students leave his classroom.
“Knowing I may have been an influence or had a small impact on their future is so gratifying,” he said. “Making a difference and opening doors to insights and opportunities and careers is highly rewarding.”
One of those students recently found his way back to Kirkwood. Justin Aspengren graduated from Kirkwood’s Financial Services program in 2021. He initially enrolled in Business Administration but switched after meeting with Saville.
“I remember it started with Todd saying, ‘You like money, don’t you?’” Aspengren said. “From there, I developed an interest in helping others with personal finance because Todd would share horror stories of peers, former clients, and even from his own experience of making bad money decisions. It built my conviction that a career in financial planning would be rewarding in the sense that people always will need your help.”
Aspengren’s internship with Northwestern Mutual led to a full-time financial advisor position, but he never forgot the instructor who helped him find his path. When Saville asked him to teach two classes while he was in Denmark, the only answer was yes.
“I felt this is a way I could give back,” Aspengren said. “It’s exciting and also rewarding knowing I might have an impact on a student like Todd did for me.”
With Aspengren at the front of Saville’s classroom and Saville a student of sorts an ocean away, the roles have quietly traded places.
“I came to Kirkwood thinking my job was to teach and open doors for students. After 20 years, I realize how much they taught me, too, and opened just as many doors,” Saville said. “That’s the gift of teaching — you spend your career believing you’re shaping their lives, only to discover that they’ve quietly shaped yours.”