Saving for College & the Tax Code

Placing the recent rush to use tax incentives as a new source of student financial assistance in both its historical and theoretical contexts, this book documents the rise of tax-advantaged college savings plans and how they signal the shift to solving the challenge of middle-class affordability and its replacement of the twin goals of access and equity as public policy's greatest higher education funding priority. Including an in-depth analysis of the affordability crisis, a detailed encapsulation of the public-versus-private responsibility to pay for higher education debate and its historic roots, and the theoretical studies of student aid and the tax code, the book develops concrete definitions of the various types of tax-advantaged college savings plans, their origin and development and a detailed taxonomy of all such state-sponsored programs in the United States. Unique to this book, the taxonomy is based upon detailed State Profiles of all tax-advantaged college savings plans in existence circa 1999. Building upon the State Profiles and their taxonomic summary, the book analyzes the rhetoric of the documents surrounding each state's program's adoption in order to understand what the state's say such programs mean. Further, each program's characteristics are evaluated against a Continuum of "Publicness" in order to ascertain the state's position regarding the public-versus-private responsibility debate. The results is both a rhetorical and behavioral data set documenting the states' policy position elevating solving the challenge of middle-class affordability above the issues of access and equity. Although the concept of "publicness" is discovered to be highly ambiguous, thebook concludes with a Best Practices description of an ideal tax-advantaged college savings plan that maximizes public responsibility to pay for higher education. Such a program will be of great interest to all policy analysts and public officials concerned about maintaining the historic American commitment to access and equity.