Trinity Christian College in Chicago is making real progress in creating a system of funding higher education that does not leave students burdened with tens of thousands of dollars of debt that, unlike business or personal debt, cannot be eliminated by filing bankruptcy.
College President Aaron Kuecker used a cup of coffee to transform the Christian liberal arts college at its root. Holding a cup of coffee bought at a local café, he asked the faculty if they felt comfortable with the fact that the cost of that coffee was being paid for by their students over the 15 years they would be burdened with college loans. He asked for faculty buy-in to change the way the college was doing business. That simple visual made the case, and the campus bought-in to making major changes.
Kuecker and his colleagues at Trinity are making great strides toward lowering or eliminating student debt with two ground-breaking strategies. The first is honesty on tuition costs. Colleges handle their pricing differently, and it can sometimes feel like a shell game in which colleges have high fees offset by a range of scholarships so that the true cost of attendance is unclear. With Trinity’s straightforward accounting, they have reduced the advertised cost of tuition by 40%, eliminating sticker shock and confusion about the true cost of attendance.
The second strategy Trinity is exploring will increase their revenue creatively. To address the problem of student debt, Trinity has become a work college, where students work to pay much of their tuition. But unlike other work colleges where students are paid for their on-campus work, Trinity students will be paid in tax-free tuition grants by local businesses. These work grants can cut down a student’s debt significantly, hopefully to something it’s reasonable to expect a summer job to pay off.
Trinity has made great strides in confronting the problem of student debt, but now students have no spending money since the money they would typically make working off-campus now goes to pay tuition. To solve this shortfall, Coté Soerens, who is leading the project at Trinity, and I have been exploring whether venture philanthropic investing funds and savings circles, powerful peer-lending vehicles, could provide a critical solution if adapted to the local micro-economy Trinity hopes to forge with participating local businesses. We are talking with Jeffrey Ashe, the foremost scholar on savings circles worldwide, who also leads a weekly Zoom practitioner call with people from around the world.
Next week, an amazing array of experienced community economic development practitioners, a theologian, and a former high-level international financier are going to gather for a day to see what we can come up with. Mark Sampson from Rooted Good, author and pastor Jose Humphries, Sundeep Vira, who had a career in high level finance before joining the Trinity faculty, and DeAmon Hargess, the social banker, and I will gather with Kuecker and Soerens to think through possible strategies,
I really believe that Trinity is on the cusp of something game-changing. Other colleges have done things to reduce tuition and lower student debt, and many are trying hard to solve the problem of student debt. Trinity has the audacious goal of getting rid of it for good. It’s a compelling project, one that a core group of people supports. It’s one of those problems that everyone wants to solve. No doubt other colleges and universities will want to join Trinity in changing the way students pay for higher education.
This project is one that we hope to feature at Neighborhood Economics in San Antonio. I want to help find the experts who might have a part of the answer and bring them to Soerens, Kuecker, and other people in higher education who are concerned about access to education, equity, and student debt. That’s a role I often play as I help a team that has some of the elements of a startup but that will also present its solution so far at the conference. Some of those experts we talk to become part of the team; others just give us their wisdom and contribute to what’s eventually created.
I am working on this one with DeAmon Harges, who calls himself a community banker. He can find the latent social capital in the ecosystem between the students, their families, the local community, and the participating businesses who are forming a cooperative. I specialize in finding creative financial solutions and the experts who understand them that might fit the situation the team is focused on.
We may not come up with the answer in our meeting next week, but we expect to find some clearer direction for inquiry and experiment. We plan to keep working on this project until we get it right, and I will continue to share what we learn in the process.