Education Savings Accounts

This innovative idea is helping low-income families save for college, By Jillian Berman, September 2, 2015, MarketWatch: “When he was a first-grader, Emily Gardner’s 8-year-old son Elijah Peters told her he wasn’t interested in college. He dreamed of becoming a handyman like his father instead. She signed him up for a college savings plan anyway. Now she’s glad she did. After a field trip to Manchester University in North Manchester, Ind., where Elijah held a pig’s heart and used Mentos to create an explosion in a bottle of Diet Coke, he began depositing his birthday and Christmas money into the account and asking his grandparents to help him save even more. ‘Just to hear that from a child who said ‘I’m not going to college,’ it is fantastic,’ said Gardner, 31, of Wabash, Ind., where she is director of the city’s downtown economic and community development program…”