Planning and saving for college should take place as early as possible. To help families make those important decisions, they need to know how much money they can put away and what it can be used for. I can easily see why a family would not want to take their hard earned savings and put them in a program where the terms could change in a few years. My amendment helps to solve that problem. We should not sunset our future - the education of our children.
Education IRAs are extremely important for a few reasons.
First, they help families afford the escalating costs of higher education. Second, the existence of an education IRA gives an additional push to a student to attend college. Last month, the Senate Government Affairs Committee held a hearing on the rising cost of college tuition. One of the witnesses was Dr. Caroline M. Hoxby, an Associate Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Commenting on the behavioral incentives of an education IRA, Dr. Hoxby noted that for an eighth grader, there is something different about knowing that there is money being put away for your college education and that you will lose it and the opportunity to go to college if you do not continue to do well.