You mean like the PACT Program, which Kay Ivey ran into the ground and then Bentley reneged on his promise to make sure it was fully funded?
Yeah, I'm still ....ed about it.
But Booker's idea is an interesting one-- my main concern is OK, you're giving them this nest egg--now we need to give them a decent education so they know how to use it.
It all comes back to education, guys.
I don't know what Kay Ivey did with PACT, but I can promise you she didn't run it into the ground.
What did that was the fundamental underlying assumption of a self-funding program. Over the long haul (which PACT would have been), a diversified investment portfolio can earn about a 9% annual return. Some years more. Some years less. Some years, you back up. There are a few things you can do to take a little of the year-to-year volatility out of it, but it will never be a parabolic curve. Still, over the course of a full business cycle, it pretty consistently reverts to a mean of between 8% and 9%. To get more than that, you have to go so far out on the risk curve that you begin to blur the distinction between investing and gambling.
The problem arises when college tuition rises faster than that for a long period of time. As it did in Alabama, rising in the 10-15% range for a number of years in a row. Expecting returns of 8% - 9% to cover costs increasing at 10 to 15% just doesn't work.
So you have a set of options, none of which are particularly palatable:
1. You can fess up that the program isn't self-funding, and have the taxpayers step in to plug the gap.
2. You can say, "Oops! We messed up. Here's your money back, with the earned return. Good luck funding college." But if you do this, you have to come up with something to handle those whose returns subsidized the gap between return and cost for the several years during which the reality of the situation was dawning on you.
3. You can track tuition costs to the return in the PACT program. Besides the tail wagging the dog, that would have stopped the incredible improvement in the physical plant, quality of faculty, and quality of student body in its tracks.
I don't know what Kay Ivey did or didn't do to this program. But whatever it was pales in comparison to the flawed assumptions at inception. This is why Economics is called the dismal science.