WASHINGTON — Children’s savings accounts and college promise initiatives could be stronger if the two funding mechanisms for higher education were merged together, a professor argues in new paper that drew praise from a U.S. Senator who says he plans to pursue legislation and funding that would make it easier to do just that.
The idea was proffered Wednesday by Dr. William Elliott III, a professor of social work at the University of Michigan.
For Elliott, children’s savings accounts — or CSAs — can ameliorate a host of problems associated with going to college and paying for it since they involve investing in a child’s college education on the front end with savings instead of at the back end with grants and debt.
Among other things, Elliott said CSAs have been shown to boost children’s social and emotional development as early as age 4, help form a college-going identity, and increase parental expectations around their children’s eventual college enrollment.
But when it comes to going to college and paying for it, there are also issues of equity that must be taken into account, Elliott said.
“It’s not just about whether or not a kid goes to college with student debt,” Elliott said. “If a kid goes to college, pays for it with debt and ends up with worse financial outcomes than a kid who went to college and didn’t use debt, to me that’s a failure in the end, because we’re not reducing inequality in society.”
Elliott expounds on his ideas in a new paper that is part of a larger policy report — titled “Designing Sustainable Funding for College Promise Initiatives” — that was presented Wednesday by ETS, the Princeton, N.J.-based education assessment organization, and the College Promise Campaign, a national initiative that seeks to build public support to make the first two years of college free.
