College affordability—and our current system of higher education finance—is not only a concern for young people. It’s an economy-wide problem that impacts higher education institutions, future employers, and the long-term wealth-building of rising generations and the communities they come from. But there are solutions on the horizon—new ideas about financing and risk-sharing models that could benefit all stakeholders across all of these sectors.
Dr. Aaron Kuecker, president of Trinity Christian College, talks with students on campus. Photo Credit: Trinity Christian College.
Last fall, the Aspen Institute Financial Security Program convened 27 leaders from higher education, business, civic and nonprofit organizations, and philanthropy with one goal—to reimagine how we finance higher education in the US. Co-hosted with Trinity Christian College, this private event featured presentations from affordable financing pilots across the country that leverage and advance the mutual interests of students, colleges, and employers, and identified opportunities to scale these solutions.
Recently, we asked two of the leaders at that meeting—Pete Kadens, founder of Hope Chicago and a Henry Crown Fellow, and Aaron Kuecker, president of Trinity Christian College—to talk with each other about the work they’re doing, and how it’s changing lives, communities, and attitudes in Chicago. We’ve excerpted some of the conversations below, but you’ll want to watch the video for the innovative and energetic approaches these two bring to the challenge of higher education affordability.
Kuecker, on the problem Trinity Christian College is trying to solve:
The fundamental problem that we’re working on is an upstream solution to student well-being. That was our starting point, but it doesn’t really touch on where we’ve landed, because most of the time when folks think about wellbeing they’re going to cue in on one segment of wellbeing. They’re going to cue in on mental health, or they’re going to cue in on academic wellbeing for students.
But for us, we were beginning to see that the overall structural economics of higher education was actually the thing that was the limiter to our student wellbeing. At the end of the day, it was economic above all else.
And so what we’ve done is really gone to work on a kind of alternate economic system that creates an upstream solution to student loan debt—and an upstream solution to student wellbeing—with alternative use of time and partnership, and then letting money flow differently. On the one hand, this is a solution. This is a problem solved for our students who feel this pain point.
What we’re seeing, and where we’re thinking bigger, is that this is a system-wide problem.
So this isn’t just about individual higher education institutions having models that aren’t good for students. It’s actually a wider ecosystem issue, where the pain points for students have to do with student access, well-being, and persistence. Pain points that our employers face have to do with employee pipelines, onboarding, retention, hiring, and the expense and challenge of that. And there’s the pain point of a non-viable future for the standard model for higher education, at least at places that aren’t hugely endowed or state-funded—places like Trinity.
So what we’ve really gone to work on is a solution that creates webs of mutuality and partnership—creating a deeper flourishing, not just for our students as students, but it gives them the opportunity to build wealth. Long-term student loan debt is one of the big limiters of some of the early wealth-building moves like home ownership, marriage, and job stability and security that harms our employers, and hurts our neighborhoods.
Kadens, on the value of Hope Chicago’s approach:
To our knowledge, we’re the only college scholarship program in the country that pays tuition, room and board, books and fees, and surcharges, and that provides a $1,000 a semester spending stipend for the students, and emergency funds if there’s a bereavement issue, or a travel issue, or a phone broken or something like that. So we are really doing sort of the lock, stock, and barrel. Every single one of our students will exit college without a single penny of debt. That’s better than most of their white suburban contemporaries. The students we serve are about 52% Latinx and below the poverty line, 48% Black and below the poverty line.
The other thing we know is that just sending a kid to college with a stack of cash is not going to do the trick. So there’s a whole host of wraparound services, or programmatic support, that starts in high school. And then there is full-time dedicated staff, what are called retention counselors, that serve most of our universities. […]
I think probably the thing we’re most known for in terms of our differentiation, though, is that to our knowledge we are the only college scholarship in the program in the country that sees this problem as a multi-generational problem. So you try and tie educational access to what you know about poverty, and to what we learned at the Aspen Institute: that multi-dimensional problems require multi-dimensional solutions. Well, poverty is multi-generational, so approaching it from a one-generational lens is probably not going to solve the problem.
Pete Kadens, founder of Hope Chicago, with area high school students. Photo Credit: Hope Chicago.
Kuecker, on how student time ties into student economics:
We started acting like there was enough time for our students to be well. That doesn’t sound like it’s an economic move, but it has been. So we don’t have class on Wednesdays anymore. We call it Well-being Wednesday over here at Trinity. We tell students, they decide what they need in order to flourish, socially, academically, emotionally, spiritually, financially, and professionally. Students have the same amount of class time, it’s just four days instead of five. Since we’ve done that we’ve seen our retention rate go up 10%. Our academic watch list dropped by about 60%.
We took that time on Wednesdays and went to our good employment partners—of whom there is almost an unlimited supply here in Chicagoland—and said, ‘Would you be willing to share more fully in both the risk and benefit of higher ed?,’ because we knew that they’re benefiting from the education and the workplace training that students were getting. And a lot of people are willing to say, yeah, we’ll do that.
And so we have been building a large web we call Earn, Network, and Learn, where students earn money for experiential education. They build their networks. They learn. They get academic credit quite regularly. And so our students use that Wednesday as an anchor day, but then other times throughout the week to do high-impact experiential education internships, co-ops, and micro internships. We have a variety of different configurations, where they’re in the workplace and they’re getting paid. They’re taking what they learn in the classroom and they’re putting it to use. They’re coming back to campus and they’re processing so the learning is powerful. But economically, what’s happening is we’re bringing funds in from those employers. Often those are direct-to-tuition grants, so no payroll tax.
Kadens, on the economics of free post-secondary education:
My nonprofit, Hope Chicago, started as a kernel of an idea when I was in the seminar room at the Aspen Institute. And now it’s a $30 million a year nonprofit here in Chicago sending thousands of students and their parents to college or trade school for free.
When you run the surveys on why students are not going on to post-secondary, there’s a whole host of reasons, but at the end of the day, it mostly comes down to financial stress and strain and the associated debt that you would have to take out in order to get to and through college. And that’s sort of like 60 or 70% of the reason that many of these kids who have the desire and will to go don’t end up going.
Now, what I’m trying to solve is how to do this at scale, system-wide. But my first focus is how can we ensure that every single schoolchild in the city of Chicago—which is a big city, we have about 400,000 students in our public schools here—every single child who has the desire and the will and the interest to learn can proceed with their learning after high school without having to worry about a mountain of debt and all the other stress and strain that comes along with going off to college. […]
I think our major issue here is a thought leadership issue, and it’s an issue of confusion and lack of clarity. The truth is that it costs $47,000 a year from the Cook County taxpayers to incarcerate one adult, and it costs $83,000 a year in Cook County, Illinois, to incarcerate a juvenile—and the taxpayers are paying that bill. To send a young man or woman to college at one of our amazing universities in this state, after Pell and after certain state grants, is about $15,000 a year. So the question is—and this is the problem we’re trying to solve—would you rather spend the $15,000, or would you rather spend the $83,000 to incarcerate a juvenile detainee? Because you’re paying that anyway as a taxpayer. I think there’s a real beneficial economic equation here if we start to get wise about funding education.
