Parents should be sure to seize this opportunity

Harold Alfond spent a lifetime making smart investments. But his last — endowing a program to create a college savings account for every baby born in Maine — may have been his best.

Alfond created the program just a few months before he died in 2007. It became a pilot program in 2008 and went statewide in 2009.

Already, 5,000 babies in Maine now have $500 college savings plans in the only program of its kind in the U.S.

The goal is to get parents thinking about college long before they otherwise might, and to give them an important head start.

For some reason, it's a lot easier to add to an existing nest egg than it is to create one from scratch.

Still, only 40 percent of the babies born in Maine are fortunate enough to have their parents sign up for the NextGen accounts.

That means 60 percent of parents aren't taking the time to enroll their children in the program or, worse, don't care.

That's a shame. While every child need not attend a four-year college, a high-school diploma alone will not prepare a young person for the world of work.

The NextGen money can be used for a variety of educational purposes, from a two-year technical program to a Ph.D.

The amazing irony of the Harold Alfond story is that while he was the recipient of five honorary college degrees, he never attended college himself.

After high school, he followed his father into the shoe business, starting as an "odd shoe boy" making 25 cents per hour.

In 1959 he bought a vacant woolen mill in Dexter, Maine, and founded the Dexter Shoe Co., which, at its peak, produced 36,000 pairs of shoes daily.

Eventually, the business was purchased by billionaire financier Warren Buffett for $433 million of stock in his conglomerate holding company, Berkshire Hathaway.

Dexter shoe eventually became worthless, but Alfond's 1.6 percent share in Berkshire Hathaway grew to $3.5 billion.

Buffett said it was the worst deal he ever made, but it was certainly a stroke of good fortune for Maine.

The Alfond Foundation went on to establish everything from sports arenas at the University of Maine to a cancer center in Sidney.

But the NextGen college fund could be Harold Alfond's best investment of all in the state he loved.

If parents establish an account and contribute just $50 per month, their child will have about $25,000 available for college by the time they are ready to start.

But it all depends on seizing the opportunity.

editorialboard@sunjournal.com