The Ladder

A Blog from New America's Asset Building Program

A Better Way to Make College More Affordable

  • By
  • Rachel Black
May 14, 2012
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This blog post was originaly published on the National Community Tax Coalition's blog WorkForward.

The wrangling over the jump in student loan rates scheduled to take place on July 1st has placed renewed focus on making college affordable. This is critical time to be having this conversation because the value of a college degree is only increasing in the post-recession economy, but, so is the cost of acquiring it.

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Event with Louis Hyman, Author of "Borrow: The American Way of Debt"

  • By
  • Hannah Emple
May 14, 2012
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The Asset Building Program is hosting author Louis Hyman for an event on this Thursday, May 17th to discuss his new book Borrow: The American Way of Debt. Janis Bowdler from National Council of La Raza’s Wealth-Building Policy Project will respond and offer her take on the role debt has played in the economy and consumers’ lives. You can join us in person next Thursday or watch live online.

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Savings Song Launches YouthSave's Financial Education Workshops in Colombia

May 11, 2012
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By Alejandra Montes Saenz, Save the Children Colombia

Cross-posted on YouthSave.org

As part of the overall Financial Capability strategy for Colombia, Save the Children has conducted several launch events in the same schools where the implementation of the financial capability workshops will take place. The overall goal of these events is to gather the students, teachers and school staff and encourage them to start thinking about the importance of saving as a mechanism for young people to achieve their goals and dreams. We used ‘edutainment’ strategies—different forms of entertainment to deliver educational messages—to develop a fun and interactive design for the youths’ first encounter to financial capability topics, so that positive expectations could be built around the upcoming financial capability workshops.

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Asset Building News Week, May 7-11

  • By
  • Hannah Emple
May 11, 2012
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The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include the Millennial generation, homelessness, economic mobility, public benefits, and banking innovation.

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New Report Shows The Saver's Bonus is Still a Great Idea

  • By
  • Rachel Black
May 9, 2012
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It's always gratifying when your assumptions are backed up by evidence. Like, when I thought adding a little coffee to my chocolate cupcakes might take them from "yummy" to "ghahhar (read: sound of Homer Simpson in presence of doughnut)." I had reason to believe this might be so: it had been a successful strategy I'd used in other baking applications. But, to borrow a phrase from my mother, sometime you just don't know until you know.

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What’s really driving the proposed SNAP cuts?

  • By
  • Aleta Sprague
May 9, 2012
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Yesterday, the House Agriculture Committee held a hearing about the Farm Bill that focused on some of the proposed reforms to SNAP. Notably, none of the panelists or representatives in attendance really had anything negative to say about the program. It was widely agreed that SNAP has lifted millions of Americans out of poverty, has provided a much-needed boost to the economy, and is one of the most efficient social welfare programs. Nearly 95% of federal SNAP funding goes directly to the benefits that allow families to purchase food; 93% of the benefits go to households with incomes below the poverty line; and fraud and abuse are minimal. So this all begs the question: what’s really driving the proposed SNAP cuts?

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Summarizing the Research: The Impact of Student Loans on College Graduation

  • By
  • Terri Friedline
May 9, 2012
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The topic of student loans is being debated in the Senate this week, with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle hoping to pass legislation that would curb rising interest rates. Without legislation, interest rates on federal student loans will double from their current rate of 3.4% to 6.8% beginning on July 1st. A recent article in the New York Times provides a good summary of this debate.

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Turning Temporary Setbacks Into Long-Term Problems

  • By
  • Justin King
May 4, 2012

The Philadelphia Inquirer's Editorial Board has another worthwhile take on the state's recent decision to raise asset limit barriers to getting nutritional assistance through the SNAP program.

Since the conventions of the blogosphere demand it, here's a snippet:

Pennsylvania is turning temporary setbacks into long-term problems. The recently unemployed must drain their bank accounts before becoming eligible.

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Evaluating School-Based Financial Education Programs: What Can We Learn from Field Evidence?

  • By
  • Rodrigo Sermeno
May 4, 2012
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Recently, I attended “Conversations that Build and Strengthen Youth Economic Opportunities” hosted by Making Cents International. The event featured Hidde van der Veer of Aflatoun, a Dutch NGO providing social and financial education to children, and Aishwarya Lakshmi Ratan of  Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), an organization dedicated to discovering what works for the world’s poor. The speakers shared the preliminary results of their RCT evaluation of the efficacy of school-based financial education programs in Ghana, a country where YouthSave also operates. While their research measured only the short-term effects of these interventions, it nonetheless offers valuable insights into youth labor market participation, risk taking, and most importantly, savings behaviors and attitudes.

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Ron Paul's Big Idea

  • By
  • Vishnu Sridharan
May 4, 2012
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Although the race for the Republican nomination is all but over, Ron Paul has brought issues to the fore that would otherwise have remained obscure. One of his classic refrains – one that has received support in different forms from the likes of Allen Greenspan and Robert Zoellick – is to shut down the Federal Reserve and return to the gold standard. Although this proposal is rarely seen as feasible, a similar movement is picking up steam in both domestic and international contexts: the call to do away with physical currency.

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