Braylon Dedmon was 3 days old when his mother, Talasheia, was offered $1,000 to open a college savings account in his name. Was this a scam? It wasn’t, The New York Times reported. The offer was the beginning of a far-reaching research project begun in Oklahoma 14 years ago to study whether creating savings accounts for newborns would improve their graduation rates and their chances of going to college or trade school years later. A few weeks after that initial conversation in 2007, the first statement arrived, showing $1,000 in Braylon’s name. The experiment, called SEED for Oklahoma Kids or SEED OK, is one of a growing number of efforts by cities and states — governed by Democrats and Republicans alike — to help a new generation climb the educational ladder and build assets. This study and others aren’t finished, but at a time when the gap between the richest sliver of Americans and everyone else is growing, the results have been encouraging. Research about the Oklahoma project published this month by the Center for Social Development at Washington University in St. Louis, which created SEED OK, found that families that had been given accounts were more college-focused and contributed more of their own money than those that hadn’t been. And the effects are strongest among low-income families. The approach breaks with most social policy programs created over the last half-century, which focus on income supplements. Child savings accounts, by contrast, concentrate on accumulating assets over the long term.
