An Evaluation of the Kansas Child Support Savings Initiative

The state of Kansas created the Child Support Savings Initiative (CSSI) in 2013 to help parents who owe child support pay off debt that is owed to the state while also saving for their children's future higher education. The program aims to encourage parents to make qualifying deposits into tax-advantaged college savings plans--529 accounts--administered by the state. In return, the parents receive matching reductions in their child support debts. MDRC applied insights from behavioral science to design and test solutions to address the savings program's primary challenge, which was that very few of the parents invited to participate ever responded or enrolled. Over several years, Kansas and MDRC conducted two randomized controlled trials to test different methods of outreach and engagement, and made significant changes to the program's design and operations. While implementation research suggests that some parents found CSSI appealing, the first round of testing saw largely trivial effects and the second round saw none. These results confirm other research that it is difficult to encourage low- and moderate-income individuals to save money. Parents in child support debt probably face even greater economic challenges than many other low-income people, as they are struggling to make their current child support payments and pay down their child support debts while meeting all their other life obligations. Members of the target population for this study, parents who owed more than $1,000 in child support debt, generally had no income or extremely low incomes.