“‘We know it works. The question is, how do you get it to work everywhere? We believe that if we set this up and demonstrate how well it works, it will make so much sense to a public payer that we could hand it over to them.’
In the meantime — once they get past their initial skepticism — students seem to be drawn to the altruism of the concept.
‘There’s something that feels very different in saying, “I’m repaying a loan and it’s not going off to some abstract place but it’s going to create this opportunity for someone else,”’ said Hill, at Social Finance. ‘And I think that matters, at least to some people.’”