payitforwardblog

[payitforwardblog]

Pay It Forward Pilot Update

Nationally, the Republican controlled congress is attempting to slash federal financial aid by $150 million. The move would in-debt hundreds of thousands of students who rely on grant aid to attend college. Meanwhile, Oregon still has a long way to go before climbing out of 47th in higher education funding.

But on April 1st 2015, Oregon took a step toward helping students. The House Higher Education Committee held a work session that passed the Pay It Forward Pilot out of committee. 

Thanks to all for your support, we delivered 500 emails, made hundreds of calls and dozens of social media posts to the Oregon House Higher Education Committee, who, prior to the work session, had come close to letting the Pay It Forward pilot die in committee.

[payitforwardblog]

On April 1st Oregon legislators took a positive step in addressing the student debt crisis. Thanks to each of your emails, calls, and social media posts the Pay It Forward pilot is closer to a vote on the house floor. 

The Pay It Forward pilot is exactly the type of long-term, out-of-the-box, proposal that Oregon needs to help students access higher education without debt. While the state scrambles to find extra revenue or fix its tax code so that our largest corporations pay their fair share, students can’t afford to continue to bear the burden of our broken public higher education system.

Earlier in March, the Boards of Trustees at both Portland State University and Oregon State University approved a $330 increase in tuition for resident undergraduate students. On the federal level, the Republican-led Congress is proposing to slash federal financial aid by $150 million! Meanwhile, Oregon’s need based aid program, the Oregon Opportunity Grant, is so severely underfunded that only 24% of those are eligible receive a grant.

Shifting costs to students is not sustainable, and it is creating a student-debt bubble on par with the housing bubble that wrecked the economy just a few years ago.

In order to address the problem, Oregon needs a long-term vision and plan to reinvest in public higher education funding.

That’s why the Pay It Forward Pilot is important. The Pay It Forward pilot is a forward-looking proposal that the legislature could enact to address the problem and wean the state off of student loans. Pay It Forward would create the infrastructure for a public fund for higher education without the traps of increasing taxes or competing for revenue with essential public services.

[payitforwardblog]

Pay It Forward Testimony: Geoff Stewart

Chair Read, members of the committee,

My name is Geoff Stewart. I live in Happy Valley with my wife and two amazing little boys.  My oldest son, Garrett, is in First Grade this year and my little one Jimmy is about to turn five. It is for them that I am asking for your help.

When Garrett was three years old my father gave him the “Walking with Dinosaurs” box set.  He watched every one of those DVD’s at least twenty times each.  By the time he was Four he could tell you if a certain Dinosaur was from the Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous time period.  He also knew what a Paleontologist was and wanted to be one.  When he was Five he was coming up with his own theories on how dinosaurs may have acted and looked like.  He is now seven and still would like nothing more than to be a Paleontologist and find and name a previously undiscovered dinosaur.  

I have told Garrett that if he really wants to be a Paleontologist that he will have to work hard in school and go to college.  Those talks with him have made me realize how much it will cost for him to follow his dreams.  The idea that it will cost over $100,000 for him to follow his dreams is depressing to say the least and the idea that even with my help with paying for school he will still enter into the job market with that much debt is unimaginable.  That should be the time of his life when he is living the dream he had worked so hard to achieve,  going to fossil beds all over the world and looking for that bone no one has ever seen, buying a home, starting a family, and helping his own children follow their dreams.

The Pay-it-Forward program will not only give him the opportunity to chase his dreams, but the freedom to live them.  I ask that you all please pass Pay It Forward so that Garrett and the entire next generation of Oregonians can keep dreaming.

As for Jimmy, he would like to be a Ninja when he grows up, but I’m sure that will change.

Sincerely,

Geoff Stewart     

[payitforwardblog]

Photos from the legislative briefing on Friday, February 6th at the Oregon Capitol. There were 21 Working Families Legislators that attended the briefing to discuss the Pay It Forward pilot. 

[payitforwardblog]

Breakdown of Pay It Foward

Check out this one-pager that gives a breakdown of the Pay It Forward program. On that page you'll be able to read answers to frequently asked questions, read about the need to address student debt, as well as why higher education should be more accessible.  

[payitforwardblog]

David Sarasohn on Pay It Forward

Take a look at David Sarasohn's article The Lowdown on the legislatures higher-ed options. In his article, Sarasohn discusses proposals being made to help lessen the burden of higher education in Oregon, including the Pay It Forward pilot!

[payitforwardblog]

HB 2662--what is it?

Curious about HB 2662--the Pay It Forward Pilot? Well, look no further, we've got you covered. You can check out the bill here, and you can also read a brief run-through below.

The Pay It Forward Pilot is designed to help students afford the costs of higher education while the student is in attendance. Once the student has graduated and it's time to start paying back their loans, Pay It Forward makes it so that the graduates income is taken into account when calculating a payment plan. There are no requirements for the Pay It Forward program, currently since it is just a pilot, applicants will be drawn at random for the pilot. This random draw will help the pilot administrators to understand what areas are most impacted by Pay It Forward. 

[payitforwardblog]

Pay It Forward HECC Work Group April Update

The HECC work group on Pay It Forward met yesterday, to set some guidelines for the pilot and prepare it for presentation to the HECC’s Student Success committee on May 7th. The group came to unanimous agreements on the key points of building a successful Pay It Forward program.

The first of these was a 6-month grace period for students participating in the pilot, similar to the 6-month grace period for federal loan repayment. These 6 months will allow graduates more freedom and time to earn and save before they begin making their contributions. Because of the nature of the pilot and the need to quickly produce reportable data, 6 months seemed like the most reasonable grace period; however when the program is fully implemented, many of us are in favor of expanding the grace period to 1 year, or even 2. Expanding the grace period allows graduates more flexibility and would actually increase the revenue of the program, because graduates would contribute over a higher-earning time of their lives. We also agreed on a 20-year contribution period.

Another piece of the pilot that was nailed down was what specifically PIF would pay for. Our proposal will suggest that PIF pays by the credit hour, so students will be able to determine how many credit hours they wish to use PIF to pay for. For example, if I qualified for a scholarship or grant that gave me enough money for 8 credits and I needed to take 16, I could pay for 8 credits using those and 8 using Pay It Forward. In the early days of Pay It Forward we discussed making the contribution .75% per year, so that a 4-year degree would become a contribution equal to 3% of a graduate’s Adjusted Gross Income. I like the new model a lot better because of the flexibility it gives students. A 180 credit degree would still end up equaling a 3% contribution, but the math behind works better. We are still working on determining the rates for community college credit hours, because it wouldn’t be fair to charge a community college student the same rate as a university student, since the tuition rates are so drastically different.

Another area we came to agreement on was the need to apply for Pay It Forward through another method than FAFSA.  This will mean students who qualify for tuition equity would be able to use PIF. So would students whose parents refused to give them access to their financial records. Oregonians will benefit from it, and it will make the program more profitable in the long term.

Next month, Chair Fullmer will be presenting the program to the Student Success subcommittee, and in June it will be presented to the HECC to have its budget approved. Once its budget is approved, we will spend the summer fine-tuning the program for final passage by the HECC. During the next meetings we will make decisions on things like how you will apply for Pay It Forward, how many people will be in the pilot, and who the fund will be administered by.

 Kevin Rackham is a student at PSU and a member of the HECC Board sub-group on Pay it Forward.  He was a member of the Senior Capstone class that originally drafted the proposal which the Oregon legislature eventually passed in the 2013 legislative session.

[payitforwardblog]

_

How bad is our higher ed situation? Bad enough that students at colleges across the nation (including PSU) have started food pantries to provide for students.  #highered #studentdebt #higherednotdebt

[payitforwardblog]

A good editorial from the Register-Guard that breaks down the program.

[payitforwardblog]

The Legislature has approved a proposal that could have students commit a percentage of future income for university payment, but it faces procedural and practical hurdles.

[payitforwardblog]

Pay It Forward HECC Work Group March Update

This afternoon I attended the third monthly meeting of the HECC Work Group charged to develop the Pay It Forward pilot program. In previous meetings we discussed topics like how to structure the program, who would be eligible for the pilot program and what percentage of Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) Pay It Forward graduates would pay.  This month we focused on how to fund the pilot program and how much it cost.

There were some interesting ideas brought to the table. The most straightforward of them relies on the passage of the Oregon Opportunity Initiative in November. This initiative would allow the Treasurer to use state bonding capacity to fund human capital projects like Pay It Forward and, obviously, the Oregon Opportunity Initiative as well. Additionally, Senator Jeff Merkley and Rep. Suzanne Bonamici have both sponsored federal bills to fund pilot programs in states who commit to maintaining a strong public investment in higher education.

Other ideas involved using PAC 12 profits, asking Phil Knight to spend his money on higher ed instead of jerseys and helmets, and unclaimed World War II bonds. That last one is my favorite. According to the Washington Post, the United States has $17 billion in bonds that went unclaimed, and Oregon can make a claim for its portion of them. The state could then put that money to use by creating a fund for Pay It Forward.

Our discussion of how much Pay It Forward will cost is looking promising. We developed a series of models of how many students could benefit from Pay It Forward under the pilot, and debated whether to use the pilot to fund cohorts of entering students. Some of the benefits of the cohort approach of students are that it’s easier to track and study the cohort, and by staggering the cohorts we could study the students who received Pay It Forward and did not receive Pay It Forward. However, I’m personally still in favor of either a random lottery of students and entering students across Oregon, or a proportional random selection of students across districts (i.e. 10% of students from each house district would receive Pay It Forward).

By our May meeting, we will have a budget proposal prepared and ready for submission, and we’re slated to have the pilot program ready to be presented to the HECC by September. We’re also looking forward to hearing from other states as the year goes on. There are currently 24 states in total pursuing Pay It Forward proposals, and the Illinois House of Representatives unanimously passed a study bill similar to ours this month. It’s exciting to reflect that this time last year, Pay It Forward was just making its way through the committee process in Oregon. We’ve come a long way in a short time and I can’t wait to see where it goes.  Kevin Rackham is a student at PSU and a member of the HECC Board sub-group on Pay it Forward.  He was a member of the Senior Capstone class that originally drafted the proposal which the Oregon legislature eventually passed in the 2013 legislative session.

[payitforwardblog]

Portland State University students introduce Pay It Forward to legislators