SF Narrowed College Enrollment Gap by Giving Kindergarteners $50 in Savings, Study Finds

New research shows that a San Francisco program that opens children’s savings accounts for kindergarteners is closing the college enrollment gap, the treasurer’s office announced Monday.

The Kindergarten to College program began opening savings accounts seeded with $50 for a cohort of kindergarteners entering the city’s public schools in 2011. Those students, who graduated in 2023, were significantly more likely to enroll in college, mostly driven by increases in underrepresented groups, the research findings released Monday show.

“Our Kindergarten to College program shows that there is a real and significant improvement in the number of kids who attend college who were, from kindergarten, raised with a college savings account in the child’s name,” San Francisco Treasurer José Cisneros said.

College enrollment was 6 percentage points higher among class of 2023 graduates with K2C accounts compared with the control cohort — 60% versus 54%, according to the study. Those gains were doubled among Black, Hispanic, Filipino, Pacific Islander and Indigenous students, closing 30% of the enrollment gap faced by these groups. The on-time high school graduation rate for underrepresented students also increased by 7 percentage points if they had K2C accounts, compared with a similar set of students without the savings.

The average savings for the class of 2023 was just over $1,400, and the program’s total savings across more than 54,000 accounts was $17 million as of May.

“The kindergarten to college program makes the concept of college real for every child in our public school system,” Cisneros said. “The families that have saved millions of dollars in these accounts are very impressive, but those millions of dollars really represent, in my mind, millions of conversations that parents have had with their kids along the way.”

The program was launched by Cisneros and then-San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom in 2011. Initially, deposit-only accounts were opened in the names of about 1,100 kindergarteners with an initial deposit of $50 in public funds using the Citi Start Savings platform. In its second year, the program doubled the number of children in the K2C cohort, according to Cisneros, and in its third year, it expanded to every student entering kindergarten at an SFUSD school. Children who were not enrolled in the program in its pilot years also received an account by the time they graduated high school.

The program costs the city $25 per student per year, according to Amanda Fried, the chief of policy and communications for the treasurer’s office. With state and philanthropic funding included, the total price per year is about $36 per child.

By high school graduation, students have an average of 28 times the initial investment — “It’s quite cost-effective,” Fried said.

Similar college savings plans have been created in municipalities across the state, including in Oakland and Los Angeles. In 2019, during Newsom’s first term as governor, he introduced a statewide program, CalKids, that creates savings accounts with an initial deposit for every newborn in the state of California.

Cisneros said that some of the best days for the K2C program are when classes of kindergarteners or first graders line up at the teller window and make deposits to their own college savings accounts.

“You really build hopes and aspirations and dreams for children by talking to them from when they’re very young throughout their entire childhood, making sure they understand what all of the opportunities for success are when they grow up,” Cisneros told KQED. “I believe that this program, these college savings accounts, have made those conversations happen and improve the outcomes for these kids.”