Finish kindergarten, get $100: New Oregon initiative celebrates with kindergarten diploma and contribution to savings account

It’s a twist on a spring tradition of high school graduates getting gift certificates and cash from relatives with their diplomas. But now it’s the state giving the money and it’s going to kids who are more than a decade from crossing the graduation stage. Oregon kindergartners, and their parents, are getting valuable new diplomas to celebrate an early milestone.

Oregon’s Kinder Grad program is a part of Embark, formerly known as the Oregon College Savings Plan. The program has long helped families build a nest egg for a student’s college or other post-high school plans.

Oregon Treasurer Elizabeth Steiner announced the new kindergarten “diplomas,” signed by Steiner and Oregon Department of Education director Charlene Williams, in a video. The state is sweetening the deal with a $100 contribution when a family opens up an Embark account.

“This is only the beginning of your child’s journey,” Steiner said in the video. “We can’t wait to see where these bright young minds go.”

Steiner and Williams will visit a Beaverton elementary school later this week to honor kindergartners with diplomas.

Oregon also has a Baby Grad program, where babies under 1 can also receive $100 to their Embark account. Between the two programs, a child can receive $200 by age 5.

The state leaders say students with college savings accounts are 2.5 times more likely to go to college than those who don’t have them. And right now for many families, college is unaffordable in Oregon, though by some standards it has become more affordable over the last 10 years.

Oregon’s Higher Education Coordinating Commission tracks the affordability of college with a specific measure that has a very long name: “the percent of public postsecondary students who applied for aid and were unable to meet college/university expenses even after taking into account expected family contributions, student earnings, most institutional aid, and all grant aid.” The most recent affordability rate for Oregon was 35%, meaning more than one-third of students didn’t have sufficient financial resources to pay for their college program. But there is a gap in affordability between community colleges and public universities.

Related: Education funding dance continues as end of Oregon’s short session nears

The percentage of students unable to afford community college in Oregon is 25%, and it’s as low as 10% for students at Treasure Valley Community College in Eastern Oregon and Southwestern Oregon Community College. It rises as high as 37% of students being unable to afford college at Columbia Gorge Community College based in The Dalles.

At public universities, the financial cost is higher — and so is the share of students who can’t afford it. However, the affordability rate is improving. Ten years ago, the public university affordability rate was 64%, meaning two-thirds of students couldn’t afford college. Today, it’s 45%.

Amy Cox leads the Higher Education Coordinating Commission’s Office of Research and Data. She said the earlier a student starts a savings account, the more time it has to accrue.

“Making a college a possibility is important for all students,” Cox said. “To make college real in terms of expectation, in terms of accessibility, is a really important part of college enrollment and college going.”

Oregon does have programs to financially support college-going students — such as the “free community college” program called Oregon Promise and the Oregon Opportunity Grant geared toward for students from low-income backgrounds. Cox said one of the main reasons affordability has increased over the last 10 years is because of increased state investment.

State officials say over 25 years, Oregon’s college savings plan has resulted in “more than $4 billion saved by families for education and career training”. It’s part of a suite of financial resources the Oregon State Treasury office offers to Oregonians.

Research suggests savings plans can be effective. A working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research on a statewide college savings plan in Illinois found students whose families paid into their savings plans had better educational outcomes at the postsecondary level. At the same time, researchers found only 11% of Illinois children utilized the plan.

Related: Oregon’s tuition-free community college aid program could be on its last legs

Rising higher education costs are certainly part of the problem. And as far as public universities go, Oregon charges more than other western states and nearly 25% more than the national average according to federal data crunched by the Education Data Initiative.

As the cost of higher education has gone up, even with investments in financial assistance, Oregon’s college-going rate has gone down. Currently 55% of students go on to college within a year of finishing high school, down from 61% in 2013-2014. The percentage of Oregonians going to college varies widely based on race and ethnicity, with 40.4% of Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander students going to college compared to 79.4% of Asian/Asian-American students, according to December 2025 data from the Higher Education Coordinating Commission.

Kindergartners this year are expected to graduate high school by 2038. It’s unclear how much college will cost by then, but Cox said getting some kind of postsecondary education will still be valuable.

“How much college will cost is hard to predict, but we do expect that it will still be significant and that many families will not be able to afford it,” Cox said.

“Anything that improves that affordability, we see as generally positive because a certificate or a degree after high school is really the doorway to the middle class. And we want to open that door as wide as we can.”