College Savings Plan Accounts at Birth: Maine\u27s Statewide Program

The Harold Alfond College Challenge offers $500 to every child in the state enrolled in Maine’s NextGen college savings plan within 1 year from birth. As the first U.S. example of a statewide Child Development Account, the Alfond Challenge is a laboratory to study and learn from Maine’s experience. This CSD policy brief provides an overview of the Alfond Challenge, examines administrative and enrollment challenges, and offers recommendations and federal and state policy directions

Saving for College: A Policy Primer

To help address the rapidly rising cost of higher education—an obstacle to college access and completion for many low- and moderate-income families—it is increasingly important to save for college. This report highlights key policy considerations and challenges, along with specific strategies, to make 529 college savings plans more accessible to families of all incomes

Toward More Inclusive College Savings Plans: Sample State Legislation

A number of states have created inclusive 529 policy strategies to make college savings plans more accessible and easier to use for families at all income levels. These strategies include: facilitating enrollment and contributions, removing saving disincentives, increasing saving incentives, and strengthening tax benefits. In this brief, we highlight these inclusive state policy strategies, describes their application through legislative and administrative means, and points to specific examples. A related policy report by the same title is also available

Streamlined Enrollment and Default Investment: Innovations in Alaska\u27s College Savings Plan

As college savings plans have gained in popularity and matured over the years, states have developed a number of innovations to facilitate access to and participation in 529s. This paper examines innovations in streamlined enrollment, pre-selected investment, and default investment in Alaska’s college savings plan. These 529 innovations—intended to facilitate greater participation, especially amongst low- and middle-income families—could play a more important role in other states to encourage savings for postsecondary education

Toward More Inclusive College Savings Plans: Sample State Legislation

A number of states have created inclusive 529 policy strategies to make college savings plans more accessible and easier to use for families at all income levels. These strategies include facilitating enrollment and contributions, removing saving disincentives, increasing saving incentives, and strengthening tax benefits. In this report, we examine these inclusive state policy strategies, describe their application through legislative and administrative means, and point to specific examples.A related policy brief by the same title is also available

College Savings Match Programs: Design and Policy

We examine here the essential elements and program design of all state 529 savings-match programs as well as the application process and other policy considerations. Like other state programs, 529 savings incentives inevitably reflect the unique demographics, economics, and political makeup of a particular state. This report provides details about inclusive savings-match program features and strategies that could make 529 plans more widely accessible to families of all incomes

Early Program Enrollment in a Statewide Child Development Account Program

Early Program Enrollment in a Statewide Child Development Account Progra

Automated on-disc total RNA extraction from whole blood towards point-of-care for early-stage diagnostics

We present a novel integrated, centrifugo-pneumatic micro-homogenizer (“μHomogenizer”) for automated sample preparation and total RNA extraction from whole blood. Using a Trizol based protocol, this novel μHomogenizer efficiently lyses whole blood spiked with E. coli, retains the organic-mixed fraction and yields the aqueous phase with the total RNA content. By the interplay of microfluidic design and a protocol of rotational frequencies, we concatenate (and parallelize) a sequence of five subsequent liquid handling operations that complete in less than 10 minutes. A comparison of the total nucleotide content yields similar performance as conventional, essentially manual off-disc sample preparation methods

Rotational-pulse actuated dissolvable-film valves for automated purification of total RNA from E. Coli

In this work we report for the first time on a repertoire of valving technologies which are combined to enable automated purification of total RNA from cell homogenate. Process control is implemented us-ing rotational-pulse actuated dissolvable-film (DF) valves; where the order of valve actuation is deter-mined by the disc architecture while the timing of valve actuation is governed by pulses in the spin rate. Selective liquid routing is enabled by combining a heavy, inert and immiscible liquid plug with a DF. The combination of these technologies enables bead-based extraction of amplifiable RNA, with a yield comparable to gold-standard bench-top protocols

Development of an on-disc isothermal in vitro amplification and detection of bacterial RNA

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version, made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License CC BY NC-ND 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). The final, published version is available online at doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.snb.2016.08.018. Published by Elsevier B. V.We present a centrifugal microfluidic “Lab-on-a-Disc” (LoaD) system capable of implementing nucleic acid in vitro amplification using non-contact heating and fluorescence detection. The system functionality is verified by implementing a Nucleic Acid Sequence Based Amplification (NASBA) reaction, targeting the tmRNA transcript of Haemophilus influenzae. The NASBA assay incorporates fluorescent molecular beacon probes reporting target tmRNA amplification for endpoint detection. The system implements non-contact IR heating to heat the NASBA reaction to the required target temperatures during denaturation and amplification steps. The LoaD control system facilitates spin speed and chamber positioning for heating and fluorescence detection. The LoaD alignment system uses magnetic fields to locate and lock the chamber in the required position (heating or detection). The NASBA assay was implemented on the system using Haemophilus influenzae tmRNA over the range 102–104 cell equivalent (CE) units. For comparison, identical qNASBA assays were implemented on a Roche LightCycler 2.0 over this concentration range.Peer reviewe