CollegeBound Boost Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis

The qualitative component of this project will focus on the expressive and instrumental value (Deterding, 2015) of a Child Savings Account for future college education. Prior work on Child Development Accounts (Child Development Accounts) and Childrens’ Savings Accounts (CSAs) suggest that CDAs have positive effects on savings and asset accumulation (Nam et al., 2012), that CDAs can encourage mothers to formulate and maintain expectations from their child at an early age (Kim, Sherraden, Huang & Clancy, 2015), and that integration of CDAs with other social services for vulnerable families has positive, statistically significant impacts on financial and social-development outcomes (Huang et al., 2019). CDAs have also been proposed as a policy that, “by providing funds for college to all children and providing these funds early in life” may increase the chances that both parents and children “view children as college-bound,” triggering other attitudinal and behavioral changes that mutually reinforce college-going through educational achievement (Sherraden et al., 2018).