The Legacy of a Promise: Examining the Educational & Economic Impacts of the Daly Fund

2017The rising cost of higher education in the United States has created increases in tuition at colleges as well as growing demand from students and families for sources of support in attending college. Over the past decade, beginning with the creation of the Kalamazoo Promise in 2005, local governments and groups of private individuals have either proposed or begun funding place-based scholarship programs, leading to the proliferation of “promise programs” across the United States. These promise programs are quite recent, but a notable exception exists in Lake County, Oregon – a natural experiment nearly 100 years in the making. This study investigates the educational and economic impact of the Daly Fund, America’s oldest place-based scholarship. Through the lens of human capital theory this study describes fund recipients’ educational attainment and economic status, utilizing survey data to show that the Daly Fund has strong positive benefits associated with time to undergraduate completion, advanced degree attainment, and economic circumstances for recipients