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Trinity Christian College Takes On The Challenge of Student Debt Kevin Jones

Trinity Christian College in Chicago is making unprecedented 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. They have essentially solved student debt with two ground-breaking strategies. The first is honesty on tuition costs–refusing to play the deceptive shell game of college admission in which colleges have high fees offset by a range of scholarships so that the true cost of attendance is unclear. With their clear-eyed accounting, they have both reduced the cost of tuition by 40% and also increased their enrollment revenue.

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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 cafe, 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. To solve 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, Trinity students will be paid in tax-free tuition grants by local businesses. These work grants cut down a student’s debt to about $3,000 a year, something it’s reasonable to expect a summer job to pay off.

So Trinity has made great strides in eliminating 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, Cote Soerens, who is leading the project at Trinity, and I have explored venture philanthropy philanthropic investing funds and have moved on to explore whether savings circles, powerful peer-lending vehicles, could provide the answer, 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, we are talking to Bert Fitzgerald and Emma Coley who built a tiny, deeply customized credit union in their Catholic worker community and parish in Portland, Oregon. That’s just initial research on some potentially plausible solutions to the problem of students not having money for pizza and beer on the weekends, or for some of their personal needs, a small but important cost of eliminating student debt.

Also 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 I will gather with Kuecker and Soerens to think through possible strategies. Trinity is on the cusp of something game-changing. Other colleges have done things to reduce tuition and lower student debt. But no other school 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. Turns out, thanks President Biden, but you can solve it up stream at the source. Colleges and universities can stop being financial parasites by changing the game.

This project is one that will be featured at Neighborhood Economics in San Antonio. My role is to find the experts who might have a part of the answer, or maybe the silver bullet for this remaining gap and bring them to Soerens and Kuecker. 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. DeAmon and I teach a social enterprise class with Trinity Church Wall Street’s cohort of clergy fellows. 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 the 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. This is a project worth spending your time on and working until you get it right.

I will report on our learnings, and continuing questions and the steps forward we agree to in next week’s newsletter.