 We are here today for saving financial aid, expanding educational opportunity and reimagining the way we pay for college by promoting children's savings. I'm Justin King. I work in the asset building program here. Our director, Reed Kramer, wanted very much to be here today but was unable to. He sends his regards to all of our participants and all of our guests. As I'm sure most of you know, we in the asset building program are committed to exploring how public policy can create pathways to greater economic opportunity, mobility, and long-term social development. One of the ideas that we've been focused on for a number of years is exploring the potential role that savings can play in orienting children towards the future. The idea that having an account in their own name can trigger behavioral change that can get kids on the road to pursuing higher education and greater outcomes for themselves than would otherwise have been possible. If it's true that there's a link between participating in a savings process and educational outcomes, then this is very clearly a powerful lever that policymakers need to care about. This could serve as a means to achieve our national goals for boosting post-secondary education but also furthering America's larger long-term economic goals. There's many facets to understanding that relationship. There's a need for a clear theory on how those triggers might work. There's a need for policy pilots and demonstrations. And there's a need for research to understand what happens in the real world. And I'm happy to say that a lot of that work is underway. We've explored the potential of children's savings accounts and we've benefited from collaboration with a number of excellent partners. And we're really pleased that today is an example of that collaboration with the Assets in Education initiative at the University of Kansas, which is led by our friend and colleague Dr. Willie Elliott. Willie has been a fellow with us in the asset building program when he was at the University of Pittsburgh. He's set up his own shop out in Kansas now and is a real leader in this work. Today Willie and the Assets in Education initiative are releasing a new report, building expectations, delivering results, asset-based financial aid and the future of higher education. This report really brings together evidence of the theories that underlie the relationship between assets and educational outcomes and highlights some of the ways in which an asset approach to college finance may deliver superior educational outcomes as compared to our current overwhelming reliance on student borrowing and debt. This work and other resources can be found on their new and excellent website. It's save4ed.com with the number four. And as I understand it, the entire manuscript of the report can be downloaded on the website. Conveniently save4ed with the number four is also the Twitter hashtag for conversing about today's event online and future conversations will use that hashtag as well for those so inclined to participate that way. I want to take a moment to thank the funders of the report for their support. Rosemary Burns from City Foundation, Zacchia Smith from Lumina, Benita Melton from Mott and Kilolo Kijikazi from the Ford Foundation. I think it's really important to note that those individuals are not just financial supporters but they're thought partners. They're committed to exploring the potential of ideas that can make a difference in children's lives. And their work in this area, I think, is going to lead us to great things in combination with all of the partners in this field. I want to thank you all for being here today as well, those in the room and those online. And I'm going to take a moment and turn it over to Rosemary Burns from City who's going to tell us a little bit more about the report. Rosemary, please join me. Thank you, Justin. And good morning, everyone. I've never been one of those speakers to say, I have a cold today so bear with me but today I have a really bad cold so I want you to bear with me because at any moment I might grab the bottle. It's really a pleasure to be here on behalf of the City Foundation talking about a topic that we believe in very deeply. And we're looking forward to a thought-provoking discussion with our panelists as we discuss the catalytic role that college savings accounts can play in improving college completion rates in our country. A little bit about the City Foundation, our mission is to support the economic empowerment and financial inclusion of low and moderate income people in communities where City operates. Here in the United States, that work in our education portfolio focuses solely on college success and supports programs that dramatically increase the number of low and moderate students who are obtaining a college degree and bringing their families into the financial mainstream and breaking the cycle of poverty. We support programs that are assisting students through the search application, financial aid process and provide them with and their families with access to college savings tools. And we're working closely with our community partners to evaluate what the financial barriers are to college completion and how they can be overcome through very targeted interventions that can then be measured. Through our more than philanthropy approach, we're putting the strength of City's business behind our philanthropic investments so that we can help improve communities. We all know that college costs have far exceeded growth and family income and too many families are struggling with trying to determine how and when they will send their young people to college. The complexity of filling out the financial aid form, those are the two biggest stumbling blocks that students and their families are facing. And studies like the one we're going to hear about today clearly show that savings reinforces the aspirations of low income and first generation students going to and completing college. And that's why City Foundation is proud to have invested over $40 million in the last eight years as well as leveraging our role as a financial institution to bring pioneering college savings to life. And I just want to share a little example with you of the work that we're doing in this space where we're relying heavily on the research to confirm and support us in this work. Working with the KIP college account program, we have taken a collaborative that includes five KIP regions across the nation, UNCF, the United Negro College Fund, who are known to be great providers of scholarship and the guidance and wisdom and the work that has already been done by the trailblazing efforts of the Corporation for Enterprise Development, CFED. We've created a college savings program that's an innovative partnership that's mitigating the nonacademic issues that students are facing in these schools that are helping them get to and through college and really determining and changing the way that their families are looking at not if I go to college, but when I go to college because the aspiration has changed. So we're building on the academic rigor and character development that the KIP schools are so well known for and do a terrific job with. And we're offering incentivized college savings accounts working with our business unit within City Microfinance to build out a product that's allowing us to make these accounts possible so that students can begin to make deposits, open the accounts, make deposits and continue to engage their families in financial education and savings mobilization so that when they are ready to make that choice as to where they go to college, they have that pool of money that we know isn't going to get them into college or pay for the whole thing, but it is certainly making a transformational change in the way that those students are seeing their future and believing that they have the opportunity to go and complete college. And that's really the work that we're so proud of. The program is a pilot. It's now in its third year with over 1,300 students actively participating. They've recruited close to $1 million in both their own deposits as well as incentivized matches that are in place to support them. And they continue to show promise that they will reach their savings goals so that those matching funds can be made available to them, which will significantly transform their college readiness and success measures. So demonstrations like the one I just mentioned are critical because they prove that what we learned through research really can happen. And the work that we're going to talk about today that Dr. Elliott, who I am proud to call my phone friend and really thrilled to actually finally be here today to meet him in person, we've worked very hard on this initiative. He's done a terrific job of moving the research forward through the work of the Assets in Education Initiative at the University of Kansas School of Social Welfare. So with that, I am very pleased to open up the conversation that Willie Elliott and Melinda Lewis are going to lead us in. So thank you very much all for being here. I have to say a quick story, building off of Justin's story. We were all sitting in the meeting room and all of a sudden like Spiderman, the water guy came hit the window. Maybe at the same time that you got splashed when he hit the window there. But it was fun. So I want to thank New America Foundation and everyone else here for coming today and for all your support and help along the way, not just today, but throughout my career and my work in this area. They've always been good partners, CFEDs here as well. I'm really happy to see you in a room. All the funders, Citi, Lumina, Ford, and Mott, we thank you again for your support. So today we're going to talk about the Biannual Report. The Biannual Report on the Asset Education field, Building Expectations Delivering Results, synthesizes a wide body of research on children's savings accounts, CSAs. Potential to transform the way that students pay and prepare for college, and in turn may help to restore the promise of the American dream. Student loans are everywhere in today's political dialogue, including here in Washington, D.C. But the scope of conversation, mostly limited to discussion of interest rates and repayment terms, misses the most important question when it comes to the student loan program. Is America getting its money's worth? Examining the cost and light of outcomes, it is clear that we could do better. While student borrowing rises, graduation rates remain flat. High costs serve as enrollment deterrence for many towns at low income and minority students, depriving them of economic mobility in the nation of their contributions. There is reason to believe that the higher education problems we lament can be traced at least to a considerable degree to overreliance on student borrowing as a way to pay for college. We have collectively failed to imagine how we could structure opportunities for low income and other disadvantaged students to create levers for meaningful college access and equitable returns on their education investments. Research discussed in Building Expectations Delivering Results suggests that debt over $10,000 may depress graduation rates and harm post-college financial security. With an average debt now in excess of $26,000, college graduates may delay investments in wealth-building assets such as buying a home. Furthermore, student loans do nothing to address what may be our most serious educational challenge, starting early to academically prepare students to succeed. As a nation, we can't significantly increase college completion rates, essential to global competitiveness, by relying disproportionately on borrowing. We need a financial aid system equipped to deliver excellent outcomes in the postmodern world. Unfortunately, none of the proposals for fixing financial aid, for giving loans, lowering interest rates, increasing tax credits, or tuition guarantees focus on the one lever that simultaneously improves college affordability, readiness, completion, and financial health and adulthood, children's financial assets. CSAs are evidence-based vehicles for improving students' outcomes prior to, during, and after college. In Building Expectations Delivering Results, we suggest that if debt over $10,000 depresses graduation rates and harms post-college financial security, and the average amount of debt children have upon graduating is about $26,000, children need to save about $16,000 in order for asset holdings to allow the student loan program to have an optimal effect. In practical terms, this means that, assuming no initial deposit, a one-to-one match on contributions, and a 5% interest, families would need to save about $23 per month, starting at birth to achieve $16,000 in savings by the time a child reaches 18. When we think about it in these terms, it seems doable, particularly when we think about the possibility of government and third-party contributions as well. When we consider the potential for improved educational engagement and achievement, it seems imperative. Certainly, in the public part of this collective investment could fit within the fiscal footprint of our current financial aid commitment, even while delivering the potential for significantly improved outcomes. This suggests that national permutation of CSAs need not be costly for children, their families, or the government. Moreover, evidence presented in Building Expectations Delivering Results shows that even having a few hundred dollars in savings, Designate for Education is significantly associated with a child's educational outcomes. Low-income and moderate-income students with less than $500, Designate for College are three times more likely to enroll and four times more likely to graduate from college. Understanding how and why assets affect student achievement is key to building the political will to create CSA structures capable of delivering these educational outcomes. Here, Building Expectations Delivering Results can serve as a catalyst in the field. CSAs build on an over a decade of research showing that for students to achieve their potential, institutions around them need to support their use of effort and ability in school, what we call institutional facilitation. Institutional facilitation is built on the realization that in a highly specialized and technical society like we live in today, institutions augment our use of effort and ability in ways that create artificial winners and losers. Steve Jobs puts it this way, humans are tool builders and we build tools that can dramatically amplify our innate human abilities. He went on to tell a story that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The story went something like this. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer and humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list. But then somebody at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a human on a bicycle. And a human on a bicycle blew the condor away, completely off the top of the charts. He then said for me, the personal computer is the bicycle of the mind. Building on this story, in 2013, a student who enters my classroom and does not have access to a computer in the latest software is at a distinct disadvantage. It will take her longer to look up related articles, she will be more likely to have grammatical errors, she'll have less time for proofreading and so on. If she's in my stats class, she will spend hours hand-calculating what computers can do in mere seconds. This doesn't mean that the student without a computer could not be the best student in class. It does mean, however, that the student would have to work much harder and have much more ability. In this way, access to institutional resources can create artificial winners and losers, which none of us like. Of course, when we're talking about students whose aspirations tend to attend college after high school, graduation wilt before they make it to enrollment, or students whose likelihood of college graduation is compromised by the strains that accompany high-dollar debt, the stakes are considerably higher than the locomotion of condors in humans. As an example specific to college loans, a student who goes to college and graduates with the higher amounts of student debt has to work much harder to reach the same level of wealth accumulation as a student who graduates from college but does not have student loans. Ellie and Nom find that living in a house with a four-year college graduate without standing student debt is associated with having about $186,000 less than net worth compared to living in a house with a four-year college graduate without student debt. Yes, the child who graduates with student loans is better off than she would be if she did not graduate. Research or an economic mobility is clear that a college degree is still a conduit to greater financial security. But this does not change the fact that effort and ability do not lead to similar outcomes in a world where institutions, some present, others left overs from times past, artificially make winners and losers. Building expectations delivery results suggest that in a postmodern world of today, what one can do, whether one group is successful or not, can only be understood within the context of institutions and the resources they provide. The right to own individual financial assets provides people with the capacity to participate in, negotiate with influence, control and hold accountable institutions that affect their lives. When we provide children with individual assets, we are essentially providing them with the power to access and command societal resources needed to reach the American dream, as well as their full capacity as tool builders for the next generation. The opposite would also have to be true, of course. When we do not provide children with access to individual assets, we are essentially denying them command of societal resources they need to reach the American dream in their full capacity. When children do not reach their full capacity, they not only lose, but we also lose. The underlying message in building expectations delivery results is that low income and minority students are disadvantaged, not because of innate capacity limitations or lower aspirations, but because they often encounter institutions that do not or cannot provide them with the financial resources they need. Don't be mistaken, asset approaches are not entirely absent from college financing. Wealthy students currently benefit from their parents' ability to signal early and often that college is likely, and significant tax advantages augment these families' capacities for building wealth to spend on their children's education. This results in an asset advantage for these students. The institutions in these children's lives, their parents, financial institutions, other, often their schools, augment their reference and ability, and send them message that college is part of their futures. This affects their expectations and in turn, their achievement. CSAs then may be a powerful tool for equity. By giving families savings incentives, CSAs may improve the financial health of low income families and educate educational outcomes of their children, reducing or even eliminating asset advantages currently held by wealthier families. Critically, these are features missing from our just-in-time debt-dependent system. And the return on investment may be huge. Building expectations delivery results presents a picture of a postmodern financial aid system where the students in 12 educators see school savings may improve student performance prior to college, helping to address long-term challenge of college readiness. Children may be more likely to identify as college bound and their parents may increase their engagement with schooling and more thoroughly encourage their children's educational progress. Colleges and universities may improve completion rates and recruitment of talented low-income students, increasing their ability to deliver a diverse, well-qualified workforce. Banks may receive new customers as more families save and more students build a foundation of economic security. Students may graduate with stronger financial well-being, better positioned to contribute productively to overall economy. In U.S. policymakers concerned about our ability to compete with other nations, given our anemic higher education performance, MACA financial aid system, better equipped to usher students through the college pipeline and into productive roles in the global workforce. In conclusion, build expectations delivery results provides evidence that asset-based approach to financial aid may be a common sense solution to the student debt and college completion challenges facing our nation. Thank you. I've got to say, Justin, when you talked about the special welcome to NAF this morning, I thought you meant the air conditioning. I think that we should hold all of our events in D.C. in the middle of July because people are glad to be here before we even say anything after they walk in the door. So I'm Melinda Lewis. I'm the policy director of the Assets in Education Initiative and at AEDI we're really committed to ensuring that our research has a policy impact and that the findings at Rosemary summarize that we're looking at from demonstrations and from the theory of institutional facilitation that Willie referenced can be translated into policy terms because that's where we can really begin to get an impact. I certainly feel being here at the New America Foundation and having these folks assembled in the room that we have the right team here to ensure that this report becomes a catalyst for new momentum to deliver the kinds of policy structures that can take this work forward. You know, for more than a decade now as Willie referenced, research evidence has begun to suggest that low-income children and families can indeed save and that that asset accumulation can deliver improved educational outcomes and as that research accumulated we begin to see then the kind of hook that we use to deliver asset policy traction begin to shift emphasizing not so much assets as the vehicle through which families can exit poverty directly but really assets as a way that we can facilitate educational access education being the most potent tool that we have for economic security in today's economy. And as we sit here today with college cost rising student debt spiraling and educational outcomes largely stagnating we recognize that we may have a particular political window of opportunity through which to propose an alternative to the federal government's primary investment in higher education today that of student loans. But we know that if we want low-income families to save and to be able to save enough to really alter their children's educational trajectories we're going to need to build some new policy vehicles through which they can do so because the primary ways that families build assets today 401k state 529 and plans traditional home mortgages disproportionately benefit those already economically advantaged already wealthy family wealthier families. This is where children's savings accounts can step into the policy breach so to speak and this by annual report on the assets and education field can serve as a sort of policy blueprint identifying some of the key features that we believe CSA's need to have in order to set the United States on the road to greater educational equity and improve the return on our financial aid investments. What are some of these key features then first every child should be automatically enrolled in a college savings account a CSA a children's savings account preferably at birth Americans are sometimes hesitant to adopt one size fits all policy approaches right but we see from the research that we have better participation and stronger outcomes when families opt out of CSA's rather than opt in that doesn't mean necessarily that every child or every family has to have exactly the same experience in a CSA universal participation can still accommodate specific outreach to and special incentives for lower income families who need some of those modifications to make savings vehicles work for them in many ways CSA's can deliver some of the same educational outcome effects through asset accumulation that more economically advantage children enjoy through their families through their parents in order to get there though we are going to need to acknowledge the barriers that those families face today to savings and develop program structures that can facilitate their success and help them overcome some of those challenges second ability to accumulate sufficient capital is critical to maximize savings for low and moderate income families CSA should be seated and contributions should be matched with public funds to accelerate asset accumulation and leverage parental expectations and aspirations for their children this match could be issued in different forms transfer directly or as a refundable tax credit and there is precedent here several states have implemented some matching components in their state 529 plans sometimes one time grants available to every family who participates and sometimes subsidies that are targeted at lower income savers to really parallel the tax incentives that are available to wealthy families through the tax structure we know from research as Willie referenced that children do not need to be able to save enough to finance their entire college education in order to see the educational advantages that come with savings at the same time though if low income children and their parents cannot realistically expect that their savings effort will result in enough asset accumulation to reshape their educational prospects CSAs will become yet another institution unsupportive of their educational aspirations relatively small tweaks in CSA policy then essentially kind of getting the details right may make a significant difference here establishing children's accounts in their own names for example can reinforce the higher education goal because research suggests that those dedicated school accounts may have particularly significant educational effects low initial deposit requirements get accounts opened especially for families with very few resources to divert to savings triggering them some of the attitude null and behavioral effects even before really significant asset accumulation can kick in savings initiatives should also include financial and college preparatory education to build the total complement of human and financial capital that research tells us correlates to greater college achievement financial education is widely regarded as a component of financial security and CSAs provide a unique and powerful tool with which to engage children in making their own financial decisions in all facets of CSA policy design best practices should be considered against questions of political feasibility and certainly New America Foundation has done some of this analysis to figure out how we can effectively message CSAs and how some of those policy components need to be structured for example while low income households need supports to help them accumulate significant assets we know that a relatively modest initial government investment say $500 of deposits at birth can generate broad political support but much more much larger initial sums may engender greater opposition early intervention then will be critical in order to give asset balances significant time to grow with time and also to let children reap the benefits in terms of shifting their expectations for college as they move throughout their academic careers finally while the case for CSAs is perhaps most convincing in the realm of improved educational outcomes that can result from student savings we know that even college graduation is not the ultimate goal of any financial aid system instead Americans value higher education primarily for what it can bring a stronger economic foundation and the promise of the American dream towards this end CSA should allow withdrawals for pre and post college expenses to support human capital investment while students are still in school and to facilitate asset purchases post graduation if the savings effects are to be lifelong then CSAs should support savings and asset accumulation from birth to death building expectations delivering results described some current CSA programs that incorporate many of these key features similarly to what Rosemary mentioned and describe some of the effects that we're seeing from some of those experiments in the field including states like Maine that provide matching funds within their 529 plans San Francisco's kindergarten to college initiative administered largely through the school district the seed okay demonstration in Oklahoma as well as international examples that illustrate the broad appeal of encouraging low-income children and families to save their own money in order to achieve their own goals the report also details policy proposals such as the Aspire Act which would create a savings account for every child in the United States capitalized with a $500 deposit at birth and the American Dream Accounts Act which would use existing Department of Education dollars to develop online platforms that partner students with entities providing savings counts and college readiness tools these examples are offered not to provide definitive answers to the critical questions facing us policymakers considering how assets can compliment loans to build a better financial aid system collectively we must still consider questions like whether state 529 plans can be adequately modified in order to meet the savings needs and capabilities of low-income students or how to best use incentives to elicit the savings behavior and educational expectations that we know from research are linked with educational success CSA's may be viable as a national policy alternative if they can be clearly understood to have potential to solve one of our most pressing problems how to bring college affordability to enough prepared students to increase educational attainment without compromising future economic success that of individual students or that of our nation as a whole importantly this policy shift does not require massive allocation of new dollars for example New America Foundation research shows that it is possible to fund the Aspire Act for only three point two five billion dollars for the first year while the federal cost of student loans is expected to be thirty six point five billion in 2013 taking into account the long-term financial effects of outstanding student loans if asset based approaches to higher education financing can reduce dependence on debt heavy ones than the net cost may be understood to be even smaller these various developments some of which will hear about more this morning rethinking Pell Grants as early commitment programs developing new structures such as Aspire modifying five twenty nine to better meet disadvantaged families needs should not be considered competing approaches but instead complementary options for delivering national CSA policy getting the parameters right so that CSA's can deliver on the promise of educational outcomes requires understanding the research revealing how assets work to influence students attitudes and behavior and what features need to be in place to trigger those effects it will demand coordination with other systems including elimination of asset test from public assistance programs protection of balances from means tested financial aid eligibility and appropriate tax incentives to parallel the advantages afforded to wealthier savers designed correctly and situated appropriately children's savings accounts may be our best hope to transform higher education how it's financed who can afford to attend how students envision it as part of their futures and the effective value of a degree CSA's work in ways that Americans understand through hard work in school and asset accumulation perhaps most importantly in today's political and fiscal climates they could be largely financed using money already committed to education but in smarter ways building expectations delivering results reflects our best understanding about what CSA policy needs to look like and how it needs to work in order to realize that potential good morning I'm Rachel black and I'm with the asset building program here at the new America Foundation and I'll be ushering us through the rest of our conversation this morning we've just heard Willie and Melinda make the case for how CSA's could fill a critical gap in existing financial aid options by helping students build both the resources and the expectations necessary for college success and we've also heard Melinda identify some of the key factors that are important in designing a successful CSA policy so now the questions before us are how do we translate this research and some of these recommendations into real life how would we expect to see savings account influence the academic trajectory of students and especially those from low income backgrounds how would we see CSA's integrated into the existing set of financial aid options and what are some of the political considerations that would influence how CSA's are implemented thankfully we have a very distinguished set of panelists to help us answer those questions who I'll invite now to go ahead and come up on stage first we have Dana Goldstein Dana is a Bernard Schwartz fellow here at the New America Foundation and she's a journalist who's written extensively on issues within the education field including a piece last year in the Washington Monthly that focused on the relationship between children's savings and academic aspirations next is Michael McPherson who is the president of the Spencer Foundation and he's also the co-author of a recent report from the College Board Rethinking Pell Grants which recommends advancing a portion of Pell into an educational savings account for low income students and we'll conclude with Ben Miller who is with the education policy program here at New America and Ben has actually just returned to us from a stint at the Department of Education where among other things he contributed to the development of the children's savings account research demonstration pilot within the gear up program after our panelists conclude we'll open it up to questions from all of you luckily you do not have to be in the room with us here to contribute a question if you are following us on Twitter you can tweet us your questions at assets math and with that I'll turn it over to Dana thank you so I want to tell you about two real life young people who participated in these sorts of programs and I hope that their stories will will give us all a sense of how all this does translate into the real world um so the first person I'll tell you about is Marsha Marsha Jackson at the time I interviewed her she was 23 years old she grew up in public housing on the Lower East Side she's a twin she had a single dad who was an alcoholic and was often physically abusive to her and her twin sister during arguments at the age of 14 there was an explosive fight between her and her dad and before he could physically confront her she actually ran from the apartment into the local precinct the police put her into child protective services and she spent the rest of her high school career living in residential facilities in Westchester which took her away from this abusive home and actually started to get her to think about college she had always been a pretty good student especially considering the trouble that she had had at home and this was recognized by the social workers and counselors who she encountered when she did leave this bad situation um so they helped her get to Gilbert college which is a small I think it's a private Catholic school in upstate New York um but she lasted less than two semesters there and I'll explain why um she had won a four thousand dollar scholarship but when this money appeared in her the bank account she had at the time she spent it within a week she had never at that point had any experience with having money with spending money with saving money and um to this day when I interviewed her she really couldn't explain what happened to that four thousand dollars she did buy a bunch of electronic sort of items um but she couldn't really explain totally what happened to it um she was also the one of the only black students at this college and she felt very out of place socially so that was a bad experience for her um and at this time she had sort of reconciled with her dad her dad was dating a woman who worked at Bank of America and would earn bonuses for signing people up for credit cards now she signed Marcia up for a credit card that quickly got her into credit card debt so she she just accrued a bunch of financial problems as soon as she graduated high school and college did not work out for her and she returned back to New York City and there she was put in basically free housing for children who were aging out of foster care or aging out of child protective services um and she was meeting with a law guardian who was helping guide her and at this point she really did get the help she need she was um she was directed toward one of Mayor Bloomberg's very um very interesting programs that's called the Youth Financial Empowerment and here she was enrolled in a in essentially a matched savings account program that was paired with financial counseling and a lot of social counseling as well and she um was put into a savings program that was matched um two to one so for example she saved about a thousand dollars and this ended up to be about three thousand dollars for her she was also given very intensive uh social counseling she enrolled at Brooklyn Manhattan Community College which was much more prepared to deal with a student of her background and to guide her um and she got very interested in graphic design now what did she use the money for that she was able to save and get matched um she used it to buy a digital camera which all the other kids in her program had and she really couldn't have participated in this graphic design associates degree program without that and also a MacBook computer she'd been relying up to that point on sort of donated used old laptops and and as Willie was saying the lack of technology can can really you know hurt someone's college aspirations um interestingly her first instinct for what to do with this money was not that as I said she was living in this apartment building for youth that had aged out of the foster care system and this was considered a very unattractive bad place to live and a lot of the young people that were living in these buildings have the aspiration to save up rent money so that they can leave and they can rent a regular apartment but her counselors at the youth financial empowerment center said hey it's really bad idea for you right now to be paying rent when you can be living essentially for free spend this money on your education now without that sort of counseling she would not have made that choice at age 19 she was very anxious to be independent and had all those same feelings that any young person would have and so it's really crucial that the counseling aspect of this helped her avoid the mistakes that she had made at her previous Gilbert College experience and she also she was also helped with getting a paid internship so the matching account and all this other stuff that was happening to her was very successful for her and she is planning now to transfer to a four-year college and continue her education and graphic design the second person I want to talk about is named Ray Von Clark he is from Washington DC he's the second oldest of six children from a two-parent family in Anacostia he was a 4.0 student and in elementary school his teachers suggested that he applied to attend KIP charter schools and he did attend KIP charter middle schools and high schools here in DC and he participates in the KIP City partnership that was referenced earlier for college completion now his savings account was seated with fifty dollars what was interesting to me about Ray Von is that he only has that fifty dollars in that account his parents or himself have not been able to add to that I mean he's one of six siblings and they even the twenty three dollars per month feels like something to his parents that they cannot they they don't have that they don't feel that they can participate in that but what's interesting to me is that when we spoke it was clear to me that having the savings account was part of sort of an overall college expectations messaging strategy that have been quite powerful and persuasive for him and if you're familiar with the KIP schools you know just how deep it goes in that environment and you know with each classroom is the name of a college that the teacher graduated from and all that and he was also helped through counseling at KIP to attend a summer program at Georgetown to get him ready academically for college and what's crucial about his story as well is that he had a lot of help with applications for admission to college and also scholarships and financial aid and because we know that the amount that low income kids are able to save is actually not enough and is not going to be near enough to actually pay the cost of college it is very important that the messaging around savings is paired with good information about how financial aid and scholarships can fill those gaps. This is interesting to me because when I was writing this article I talked to some social psychologists in this field who said that children as young as third grade are able to say things like I won't be able to go to college because it's too expensive. So if an eight year old can say that it's very important that when we start talking to kids about savings it's matched by the message that that is not the only way. You know there's a lot of different ways that you can go to college in terms of in terms of paying for it. So yeah these savings accounts are important but they must be part of a comprehensive comprehensive strategy and I think in the in the two cases of the kids that I talked to it really was and that's why it was successful for them. Thank you. I think I'm next. Is that right? So I was a member of a power house panel basically had consisted of higher education leaders researchers and me who didn't belong in many ways but we were focused on Pell the Pell system as a whole and reforming Pell and we our report has a number of brilliant and fascinating ideas that I urge you to check out and one one aspect of the report was a proposal for savings accounts for children using the kind of information that's in the Pell Grant to guide who would get the accumulation in the accounts. Basically the idea was that a child reaching a certain age would might be seven or ten or a number to be decided would qualify for a savings award based on family income and assets if those if that income and assets would have put that family into Pell if the kid were of the right age to go to college. Those would only be usable for for post-secondary education and it would cost the government nothing unless the child did decide to go to post-secondary school. Now I won't go into the details of this. I just want to mention three ways that our proposal differs from the CSA proposals we've been hearing. One is our proposal and I have to make this clear was proposed as a compliment to Pell which would require additional support. We did not say to divert money from Pell into this program and if I'm going to be able to eat lunch with the people on that panel you've got to hear that. We did not say that. It's not crazy to think about doing that but it's not what we said. Second our proposal for low income people does not include any matching component. The proposal that we had says the federal government creates these accounts. They come into play if the person goes to post-secondary education but there's no match. I'll come back to say because I think this is really important why we think that. Third we proposed beginning this as a pilot effort with carefully designed experiments and demonstration programs to illuminate the behavioral effects in controlled ways. We know more than we did 10 years ago and it's great that some states and others have tried programs with some of these features but our behavioral knowledge and our causal evidence are quite shaky and sketchy on these matters and a lot of work needs to be done particularly a lot of work would need to be done before you could say with confidence that this is a better use of money than Pell which would be what you would be doing if you divert money from Pell to this. Those are important differences but I want to underscore that the whole panel is very sympathetic to all the basic reasons you all suggested for why thinking about the asset and saving sides make sense. Now let me come back to the why no match question. I actually want to use what the first panelist said to explain neither of the family she described would have participated in your program not the alcoholic father and not the family with six kids right. They have to save hundred thousand dollars to meet your design or twenty three dollars a month time six right. That wouldn't work. The reality is that it's really hard to save when you're poor. Some people can do it. Maybe a majority of people can do it. They may be the people who who manage money better grew up with better experiences at home who aren't quite as badly off as some other low-income people or who have somebody in the wings who is in a position to help them. Maybe a majority of people will do that but some substantial fraction of parents won't in fact save. A lot of poor families are in really tough shape in the ways that that she described. Maybe there are people who just are not good at parenting. Maybe there are people who have harder than average life owing to illness or addiction or some other factor. Either way, none of that is the fault of the kids. Why should Marsha at age 14 not have had any money in a savings account because her father was an alcoholic? We think it's really important to recognize that above some level of income matches make sense. Below some level of income those kids just need help. And it's not their fault if they have irresponsible parents. I think now I'm speaking more for myself here than for our group. Although we were very clear that we didn't want to match for these these for our program but I think it's really important to say something like you need to disregard a lot of income up to some level at which you begin to require a match or you're going to leave the worst off people in this society out of your program. I think that's important to think about. Thank you. Thank you. So, you know, it strikes me that when you're talking about sort of the benefits of child savings accounts you really see two different things. One is sort of the actual accumulation of assets to help afford college and the other is this sort of aspirational giving people a sense that college is affordable they should go. And I think that actually if you were designing accounts to achieve each of those goals they wouldn't quite look the same. So if designing an account designed to get people to accumulate assets versus building aspirations look quite different and I think if you think about what the government role either the state or the federal role is here trying to get a federal role to actually help with the accumulation of the asset side I think would be very difficult and I can talk a little bit about our experience with the gear up program as to some of the challenges we encountered there but that I think of your focus is really on the aspirational side and you wanted a strong state role that sort of creative use of accounts involving a lot of expenditures the state's already doing could actually be very promising. So just really quick in terms of the federal side of things with the gear up program you know there's sort of three main challenges we encountered there and if you were to sort of expand this broadly I think they would still apply. Cost obviously is an issue you know right now we were able to sort of take additional money from the gear up program that we had there to fund these accounts but if you wanted to do it at scale you'd be looking at a fairly sizable additional federal investment and it's probably hard to find that money at this point in time just because sort of the main federal financing program for college right now is the Pell Grant program and that's slated to run with fairly substantial budget deficits going into the future and because the way it's budgeted Congress needs to find that money each and every year so you'd be looking at sort of a zero some game competition but the second sort of difficulty we encountered was sort of the infrastructure if you think about the Pell Grant program in the way the federal government supports higher ed now it essentially has 7,500 middlemen in the form of colleges and universities to help them give out the dollars make sure they're returned if they're not used properly sort of obey all the different rules around that so if you wanted to extend extend the savings accounts to the federal level you'd need to think about either building an infrastructure that would have the federal government dealing with sort of millions of additional kids one on one or working with states to set something up which is achievable but it would be a lot of additional work and the third problem that I think was sort of our biggest drawback with the GEARUP program in particular was that basically whenever you use federal dollars they come with about as many strings as a marionette we had to set in rules that said that the federal dollars had to be put in a separate account because you had to make sure they weren't co-mingling with the own contributions and being taken out incorrectly that separate account basically had to be in risk-free assets so essentially you were getting kind of no interest accumulation from those dollars since t-bills return almost nothing at this point and then there were a host of other restrictions on what you could pull the money for and how it would work and you know when we were dealing with grantees I think they found that very challenging and we ultimately were unfortunately not able to get anybody to apply for that program but if you take a step back and you say you know what we really want to focus on is the aspirational side then I think it's worth remembering that states already invest a great deal of money in their own financial aid and their operating subsidies unfortunately they basically waste a good chunk of it in a lot of states because they give it on so-called merit aid which is sort of going to people who don't need it as much so if you were to think about maybe modifying what some states are already doing to make their aid look more like an account structure I think they could be very powerful and I think what you would base this off of is sort of the so-called promise programs that a number of states experiment with so states like Indiana what they do is they go to students in middle school and say to them sign this contract with us and if you agree to do certain very basic reasonable things like take a college prep curriculum maintain a 2.0 so not like some crazy high GPA apply to colleges fill out the FAFSA etc. we will give you either all or some of your tuition covered and so what you're doing is you're sending that message to students at a much younger age that sort of your behavior can build you toward college but the way those programs tend to work now is they're sort of an all or nothing shot you either fulfill the contract and you get this great benefit or you don't you've accumulated nothing so if you were to think about converting that and it's something that looks more like an account where someone sort of each year that you've fulfilled the terms of the contract you gain part of your college shares so the notion you're accumulating your college education that way you could even build in sort of benchmarks like if you pass algebra 2 which we know is very important for college success will give you additional money things like that so you're really tapping into the resources that are already there and I think that if you did that you could still have a strong role for the Pell Grant Program which would be right now basically if you're getting a Pell Grant you find out more or less spring semester of your senior year when you fill at the FAFSA and that's really too late in the game to tell kids to sort of adjust their behavior realize you know if you're very poor here's $5600 that could be on the table for you so what you could do in this structure is if a state was willing to sort of use their own dollars more intelligently you could say we'll take advantage of this existing flexibility that's in law but never been used that allows states to determine Pell awards based upon eighth grade family income so you could say to a kid you know you do it a couple of years built toward college we already can tell you right now that if you keep on this path here's your Pell Grant and so basically by leveraging dollars that are already there you can build the same expectations without needing to deal with as much of the concerns about cost and how the dollars are invested and things like that because you can just show them that the money that's already going to be there for you that right now we don't tell you about until we take your income information run it through a magic formula and sped out a random number actually is there earlier on so again I think it's just about thinking about when you're designing these sort of what's the most important role here is it really the accumulation of the dollars or is it sort of the aspirations because I think there are resources that could be there to help with certainly the aspirations side. Great. Thank you to everyone on the panel for your comments. Willie and Melinda there was a lot that was just said so I'm going to give you first crack on responding to what we just heard. Thank you. I think that one of the things that we need to do in our society in general is a think about how we set expectations for low-income individuals for high-income individuals on how they differ. For one thing we spend billions of dollars marketing to children at a very young age to low-income children as well as as high-income children to buy goods. Right. Families allow their children to make decisions on where they go to eat whether they go to the movies right at very very young ages. And we do spend time talking about this in this report and the point of that is is that if we think that families even low-income families have some money to spend on goods that aren't necessarily for education or for other purpose but they have some extra money then while it is true that some of the really poor individuals might not have any money but but many of the low-income individuals do have money to save. So part of the problem is we think they can't save. We start off from that point of view in the beginning. Whether it be through our social policies in which case we give asset limits and we say you're not allowed to save or if we just simply come at it with a perspective of hey these people can't save. How can they possibly save? So I think we need to change that mindset and begin to understand that low-income people can save. Can they save enough for college? Does it need to be supported in other kinds of ways? Absolutely. But there's a real benefit from the very beginning just having them understand even the story that Dana gave it before that this individual learns on about how to save how to manage money, right? We're talking about transforming the financial education system. We're actually talking about changing a mindset. Changing changing the way that we think about how people finance college is no longer I'm going to mortgage my home but I'm going to find ways to save and build money for that and not only that the government's going to participate in this activity you're not alone not only that companies can participate businesses can participate local communities can participate in child saving on their behalf. We do think that it's extremely important we spend a whole chapter talking about this as well that that there is a case in which some families for whatever reason can't help this happen. In those cases we do need to find ways to support to make this happen and understand that that's what it has to be we think we think either in the child's name or something like that maybe maybe it works out and mechanically is not that but they get the bank statements they understand is their account they're able to participate in this thing and so I think taking some of those things in consideration is important and and when we think about the Pell Grant Pell Grant is one of many different ways in which we're spending money right now so the question I asked in the beginning are we spending our money in the best way is an important question to ask because it's not only about whether or not a child has access at the point of enrollment right that is a whole financial aid system is designed so that people can access college but it's also about how they leave college and it's about them getting to college and one of the we think the benefits to having some savings programs which is a lot of thought that needs to be done yet we don't claim to have the absolute model or answer at this point in time on how this will all look I think there's some great things that everybody's mentioned down here maybe states will be involved in finance but there's many ways of doing this and how can we use existing money in better ways to maximize children's long term outcomes we need to start thinking in that way it's not just about getting a kid into college but it's what kind of condition there are when they may leave college do they have lots of debt are they going to have to take part of their income later in life right how are they then at the same same position that somebody else who doesn't need student loans who doesn't need to pay back their college tuition later on in life some way right how are they in the same position it's about equity also it's about someone leaving with a college degree who has the same effort the same ability having the same opportunity then afterwards and put it in the best position for that as well it's not the same we gave them a college education but also did we give them a college education and put them on the same footing as other kids with a college education is also important so I think there is this big picture and do we have all the answers by no means but do we have something that we think can work and make sense yes and we now we just need to continue to work at flushing out all the ideas and working together to figure out how that works in real terms with the federal government with the states with individuals and I think there's some work to be done on that yet do you have anything that you want to add to that not much I think just what I had written down as I was listening and particularly crystallized for me listening to Ben talk this is a not insignificant challenge that we face this idea of how do we in some ways we're headed in the wrong direction in terms of a widening college completion gap in particular as Willie said it's not just about getting kids in school and Dana's stories reference this too you know we are seeing research that suggests that assets may also shape how students engage in college how we can turn them into informed consumers of the educational experience when they're there we're seeing a widening chasm in college completion rates among more economically advanced between more economically advantaged and disadvantaged students and so in order to confront this challenge we really need to make sure that we are using every possible tool and every policy lever at our disposal and so while as Willie referenced and you know it's on the front page of nearly every paper now we're talking a lot about some of the variables in college financing where should interest rates be and you know what should be the mix of loans and other types of products one of the things one of the elements were not really fully exploding is that exploiting is that of timing and that I think was a theme throughout each of the panelists remarks how can thinking about how students get not just actual financial resources to finance college but also information and assistance in shaping their expectations about college at different points in their academic career how can we make sure that we're not leaving the variable of timing on the table so to speak but really think about what can we learn about how we engage children at young ages in other aspects of financial decision making and leverage that for reshaping their experiences not just as they are young but also post college as we think about how to ensure that a higher education really gets them to where we're trying to go so again as as Willie said you know there are obviously unanswered questions about exactly who needs to be engaged and what their contributions might look like but I think that we really need to kind of fully engage this variable of timing as we think about how we might be able to get more for some of the existing investments that we're making while of course not denying that there collectively confront this challenge. Great thanks and let me ask William Melinda just one follow-up question before we open it up to the audience I think we heard some concern that maybe at best federal engagement in developing a national CSA policy could maybe at best be well-meaning but perhaps ineffectual and at worse a diversion of critical resources and existing programs and one that could further concentrate the availability of higher-ed financing resources on the upper-end can you speak a little bit to maybe some key design features that would be necessary to ensure that lower-income students are at an advantage? I would say several things and part of this comes on on the asset world itself whoever that is those people studying the savings accounts and stuff is for instance like the gear up program one is is that it is new to the education department to the education field and for the financial aid field to be working around CSAs so there's some learning curve there and so I think that there needs to be adequate timing before you start a program so that you can get people ready with the gear up program I didn't think there was adequate timing and adequate consultation around a lot much of the things before they even came to kind of the quote on quote experts in the field around CSAs was already in place and so I think that if we were going I think it was well-intentioned I don't think that's a much criticizing them for that I think it's just not knowing right and and so on how to go about it and so there needs to be the right people at the table in the first place secondly I think if we're talking about whether or not the federal government or states or other people are willing to divert money into the savings arena well it's not satisfactory to me being a researcher who knows nothing but that it's simply can say that they don't want to or they don't feel like it's reasonable the case is if there is a good reason if we can maximize our dollars and use them more smartly then we should do that right now I think there's still an open debate about whether or not this is is the absolute answer but it needs to be on the table and we need to begin to discuss it and figure out would Pell grant dollars be better used if they were given much earlier there's a lot to talk about this generally whether we're talking about with CSA's or otherwise there's there's a growing amount of people talking about should we start giving some of this money earlier on now whether we join it somehow with a CSA program is another story but there's a lot of momentum around the idea or thought around the idea of maybe we should some people say should give it in 10th grade some people say should be in 5th grade but there's this discussion as to whether or not some of this money could be diverted and used earlier because why? because we know that if children get access to this money earlier I don't know if we know it 100% but we have a real good sense of of that this might be the case and if it is the case then we should really think about whether or I can say this in my research or our public policy people think it should be or not we should press it and say that maybe this is something we really should be part of the conversation we think about in real ways. Yolanda do you have anything to add? Okay great. Okay great well we have two microphones if you're interested in asking a question please raise your hand and wait for the microphone to you this is for the benefit of our audience who is watching online they will not be able to hear you if you do not speak into your microphone. All right. All right Hanna. Morning. I'm Bob Hilderith and I run a savings program for about 600 families in Massachusetts called Fuel Education. We've found that providing incentives is a real science that the seeds and the matches cannot just be assumed to work as far as motivating parents and I wonder how much the panel has has thought or has accessed the world the science of behavioral science of motivating low-income families. So I think that there is a lot of research yet to be done on how do we specifically engage families to save to increase their savings. There's a lot of work around games and different kinds of things as well to help incentivize and help people to save that showed some promise. I can't say it's a particular area of study that I've delved into a lot and that I had that this report goes into in great detail and so I don't think I'll speak a lot on that but there is a lot of research going on by a CSD and others our Center for Social Development and others around use incentives in ways that can create greater savings. I would just note I mean I think you're right that this is a question that needs a lot of study and it's it's very likely it seems to me that there is a lot of variation within any of these populations in their proneness to respond to particular kinds of incentives. So just in the way a big article in the New York Times on Sunday said that that these random control studies of medicines fail to capture all the ways the medicines work differently for different people. I think the same is true of programs like this. There is a lot of research in a closely related area which is saving for retirement which is a huge disaster as we know in this country. The we've we've basically shifted from having employers take care of the behavioral problems of saving to passing them back to the employees as individuals and that of course so much in our society is moving from institutions helping to provide stuff like college education to expecting people to figure it out for themselves. And I think in the retirement literature there is a lot of work on these questions about how you frame the alternatives for people in order to produce good decisions about 401Ks. Don't make it complicated. Give them a simple default. Don't ask them to do too much. Build it slowly over time. There are a lot of lessons I think that could be imported to benefit both sides. In terms of behavioral looking at behavior up in New York the Youth Financial Impairment Program that I talked about is part of Mayor Bloomberg's larger office for economic opportunity and they have a small program that's Model.opportunity that is the Mexican Program where parents are paid for positive behavioral outcomes such as taking their kid to the dentist and rolling their kid in Medicaid having good attendance or good grades in school and they are given a debit card that has cash on it. And now in that program they're not requiring that the money gets get spent in any particular way but when I reported on that in a different article I found that the families were not generally spending those savings on educational purposes. Some of the things that families were spending on were for example they were an immigrant family a trip back home to their home country to see grandparents. One family I thought this was very interesting this was a family with something like eight or nine children a Somali family they spent the money on like an extra large freezer that they could store foods in so that this mom could like go to Costco and buy in bulk and get lower prices for food. So these are you know it's hard to say that they shouldn't have spent on these two things that have a lot of good outcomes for a family whether you know those ties to grandparents those social emotional ties and also food is food is just a major major concern for these families. I mean that's why Rayvon's family here in Onicastia cannot put twenty three dollars in the bank. So it's interesting that up in New York there has been experiments with all sides of these questions and there hasn't sort of been one comprehensive approach but there's interesting research coming in. Great next question. Hi I'm Andrew Levere President of CFED ten years ago when we ran the first demonstration for children savings accounts seed with many of you in the room. We hired pollsters to figure out what people thought of them and everybody thought they were a great idea but nobody knew what problem they were solving. Today we find they are solving every problem. In terms of issues not just of college completion and expectations but all issues of financial security. So I just wanted to raise a point about a whole another dimension of what we are seeing with CSAs to get people's reactions which is the issue of financial inclusion. And this goes to will poor people save. So one of the most powerful data points we know is that unbanked people on average spend a thousand dollars a year on financial services. Payday lenders check cashers rent to own. So as we think about getting these families banked and in mainstream accounts we then open up other opportunities to generate savings and match and access to the kind of financial services and advice that we need. So I'm just very interested in how does this whole financial inclusion piece fit into this because actually I think it's going to play at the policy level as important an argument and as many of the arguments that you're making today. So I think it has a huge part of what we're trying to do and we're thinking about it and it also ties into the idea of thinking about after college right. So the condition that people are in when they leave college or they and a financially stable situation do they have the financial knowledge to maximize the the money they're going to make from education even. And so I think it all ties in for why we should at least give this some I wanted to also return back to the conversation on on behavior. So so often we I think it has to do with our expectations of the poor and saving in the first place as we automatically think that they cannot save and do not save. And so a lot of it is given them access to mainstream banking institutions because one of the things that Michael sure had and talked about an assets for the poor in the very beginning was this idea that the reason why any of us save for the most part is because we have access institutional structures that allow us and promote savings in the first place. So now how do we begin biases about whether the poor can save now can they save enough is a different store right but building that foundation give them all access to the institutions the structure they need to begin building up ways to save like the rest of us is very important then we have to think creatively as a people do we want everybody in college and if we do we understand that just by the fact that they make a lot less money in college is so expensive they're not going to be able to save forty thousand fifty thousand dollars and then we find ways to help them through matches through incentives in other ways to help them accumulate more of that savings but the key for them is that they will be once they get through college able to earn more right hopefully through having a college degree and then having the be in the financial position not to be like myself is a hundred and twenty thousand dollars in debt right and have to figure out ways to pay that for the next fifty years but to be in a position where they can have the knowledge and have the financial ability to move forward to really change the the plight of their family's lives you know this economic mobility we so much talk about and think about to really see that come to play because we we're not seeing it now so how do we begin to make that happen so these children actually can be in a position to leverage college and change their lives the best position they can be in it strikes me that you'd see some probably other benefits there as well because right now we talk about sort of choosing to go to college but it's not just choosing to go to college choosing where you go to college and so the notion that sort of if someone becomes more involved with sort of the larger financial sector they should hopefully become sort of smarter consumers understand sort of terms on their loans terms on their debt and think about that when they're then picking where they go to college because as we see right now sort of in general low-income students aren't making particularly smart decisions about where they go to school so you see people who are academically capable of going to a four-year who go to a two-year which has fairly significant ramifications for whether or not they'll ever earn a four-year degree or you see them very susceptible to sort of very aggressive marketing that ends the melt in sort of low-return programs where they take on high amounts of debt I think largely because they don't understand sort of the product they're taking on because they haven't had much experience with debt so the extent to which sort of getting more involved in the banking sector prepares them for understanding how to judge returns of programs I think that would be very helpful for college decision making. There was a question up here. With diverse issues in higher higher education two questions one answer fellow right. Two questions one has to do with restrictions you know families of all income levels from time to time have different crises be medical it could be facing eviction anything so what types of restrictions would be placed on a college savings account to kind of mitigate against the temptation to quote unquote raid the account you know to handle this emergency or that emergency the second question would be has any thought been given to engaging families around the issue of saving for college during tax time there was an experiment once and we have some people that were involved in that in the room now we're filling out the fast for during tax time led to to greater enrollment so I'm wondering if that might be an ideal time to engage families around questions of saving because you're getting lump sums of money in a lot of cases and that might be an ideal time especially it's like a yearly thing so even if families don't do savings any of the time except except tax time if they do that annually at that time that could be substantial in terms of savings Jamal I'll take number one and I think Melinda could take number two is that good? Sure on number one the restrictions so typically when we when we think about CSA's they thought about it being restricted no you can't access the money until you reach 18 at college and use it for some kind of one of these stated purposes depending upon the type of CSA we're dealing with sometimes it's for home ownership education business so you have to use of one of these types of purposes so there's they tend to be really restrictive in that sense as we've seen them however I think that there is a need for emergency savings and other types of things and we've seen within the research that even liquid assets assets you can spend readily have positive effects on children educational outcomes so there's there is reason both empirically and philosophically or theoretically to think about why children should be able to access some of that money earlier so somewhere like Singapore who has quite the well-developed savings or asset-building program has multiple types of accounts for children one one account they can actually access some of that money to do educational growth types of things and another account is purely just for paying for college and they have accounts for home ownership and some other things so they have a really a multi-tiered system where they have a number of accounts they can use to address these issues because these are real issues right? I mean low-income people do have expenses that come up and they have to find ways to address these issues I mean so I think it is real important and there are ways to do the address and think about that and in terms of you know trying to really capitalize on that particular moment in time at tax preparation I mean it really gets to the earlier question about what kinds of incentives and structures will motivate people to save which you know as I think several panelists kind of referenced is not a question that is unique to lower-income families right? This question of how do we get people to make the best financial decisions for themselves and their futures is a question that you know confronts all of us in this room and certainly U.S. policymakers on a variety of fronts for individuals at all income levels it's just the lower-income families don't have quite as much grace they you know wealthier families can make relatively poor financial decisions and still sometimes rebound from that fairly easily and lower-income families have a much smaller margin of error but you know tax time is an opportunity there have been some demonstration programs that have looked at tying individual development accounts as well as CSAs to tax preparation New America Foundation is doing some work and has done some looking at the tax structure in general as a vehicle for delivering asset accumulation opportunities to lower-income families not just by linking saving to the time of tax preparation but also looking at the role that refundable tax credits might play for example as a potential role for the federal government in incentivizing the savings of lower-income people I think there's reason to believe and the report does touch on this to some extent that tax incentives and kind of the piggybacking on the tax structure as a whole is not an adequate way to deliver child savings account opportunities to lower-income folks but it certainly must be a part of the equation particularly because as you said there are reasons to look at every possible way to build on inertia and you know take advantage of those moments that when you know somebody is going to be getting some money if we can make the diversion to a savings vehicle at that point all of us benefit from resetting that default in ways that are in our long-term advantage. piggybacking your question and one of the good points that been made the federal government knows a lot about people's financial circumstances the IRS in particular knows a lot about people's financial circumstances maybe almost as much as Google knows about their financial circumstances and if the IRS leveraged the knowledge they have to provide people with better information about what they could expect in terms of later financial aid or in the case of the program we proposed to actually provide people with you know a black and white promise that you are going to get this money accumulating at such and such a rate if you're in these circumstances now that could help a lot gradually the IRS has been pried loose from its long time stance of not wanting to share any of this information back to the families who provided it but it's still a very uphill struggle to get their cooperation on these things. And there's there's already actually precedent for something like that I mean every couple of years the Social Security Administration sends you something that says you know if you were to retire become permanently disabled here this is how much you'd receive in benefits so clearly it's it's something it's capable of being done and the final thing I would just say on taxes is if you were looking for a pot of federal dollars that is currently spent on education and is not well used that the tax benefits would be the immediate place to start because they make filling out the FAFSA look like a walk in the park they're ill-targeted they're complicated and they are fairly substantial investment. On that note I think we need to close out our conversation this morning I think our panel will remain available if you have any additional questions please join me in thanking them this morning I would also encourage you to go to save4ed.com where you can download the full copy of the report that we've been talking about thank you for coming