Individual characteristics and social services associated with asset building in a children's college savings account program for low-income families

Discussions on giving children some form of savings accounts with public deposits at birth for future use have recently attracted the attention of policy-makers and researchers in the US and beyond. It is thought that having financial assets when children become adults can help reduce asset gaps and inter-generational poverty. One use of children's savings accounts that is of profound importance is college education. Low-income parents do not have access to saving and asset-building opportunities for their children's college education that is equitable to that of higher-income parents.;Currently, a national policy, practice, and research initiative known as the Savings for Education, Entrepreneurship, and Downpayment (SEED) is testing the efficacy of asset-building accounts for children and youth in the US. The SEED initiative is administered and studied by a group of national partners including CFED, the Center for Social Development at Washington University, and the University of Kansas School of Social Welfare. A team of scholars at the University of Kansas School of Social Welfare is responsible for a number of different SEED studies using a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods.;This study uses data from one of the largest SEED children's college savings account demonstration programs in an economically distressed city in the US. The primary research questions are: (1) what individual and household as well as social service factors are associated with parents decision to join a children's college savings account program? and (2) what individual and household as well as social service factors are associated with having deposits among parents who open accounts? To answer these questions, descriptive, bivariate, and multivariate statistics are done.;Sixty two percent of the parents decided to open accounts, and that among these, 37% had made some personal deposits into the accounts. Factors associated with decision to open accounts are parents' level of education, in-person contacts to parents by SEED staff, and a measure of the efforts put by different SEED staff in recruiting parents to join SEED and open accounts. Parent's education, race, and the type of SEED orientation attended by parents were associated with making deposits into the accounts. Clearly, fewer factors are associated with either asset building outcomes.;Overall, factors associated with asset building in the study are supported by existing literature, theory and research on asset-building with low-income households. While the proportion of parents involved in either phases of asset-building in the study seems small, it is impressive, and the role of social services may be crucial in the future for supporting such programs. However, in order to understand and pinpoint the exact circumstances and conditions necessary to build assets in the US among low-income households, more research is needed with larger and diverse samples. Implications for social work research, practice, education and policy are discussed.