**1. Introduction**

The city of Buffalo, like many postindustrial communities scattered across the Great Lakes and upper Midwest region of the United States (U.S.), suffered significant declines during what St. John (Ch. 1) describes as the global period, when neoliberalism replaced more progressive policies. At its height, Buffalo, NY, was a national center of commerce, serving as the gateway for the flow of goods from the interior portions of the country through to the Eastern Seaboard when the Erie Canal opened in 1825 [1]. Buffalo flourished through the middle of the 20th century and became a center for steel production. At the height of World War II, Bethlehem-Lackawanna Steel became the world's largest steelmaking operation, providing material supplies for the U.S. military effort [2]. As recently as the 1960s, the population of the city of Buffalo reached more than 580,000 residents [3]. Since that high water mark, the city declined in population to 278,379 [4] and grew increasingly segregated. Bethlehem Steel and the entire steel industry in Buffalo closed their doors along the shores of Lake Erie in the early 1980s. It would be fair to say that the city of Buffalo was in a period of social and economic decline for nearly a half-century. The past decade was very different for Buffalo and the Western New York region. The city experienced a renaissance in the early part of the 21st century. Part of that success is attributable to a comprehensive, community-based educational reform and economic development strategy driven by Say Yes to Education—Buffalo, a local non-governmental organization (NGO).

Say Yes Buffalo was launched in partnership between local civic, community, education, business, and philanthropic leaders and a national non-profit organization of the same name. The economic resurgence of the city and the region began before the organization started. Still, it was the driving force behind a comprehensive social change initiative to leverage the power of postsecondary education to drive economic growth in Buffalo. Say

**Citation:** Daun-Barnett, N.J. Say Yes to Education—Buffalo: A Human Capabilities Approach to College Access and Local Economic Development. *Educ. Sci.* **2023**, *13*, 472. https://doi.org/10.3390/ educsci13050472

Academic Editor: Han Reichgelt

Received: 30 March 2023 Revised: 30 April 2023 Accepted: 2 May 2023 Published: 4 May 2023

**Copyright:** © 2023 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

Yes was instrumental in shepherding a large-scale social change initiative in Buffalo, and this paper focuses on the signature feature of their work—an endowed scholarship that was described as a last-dollar tuition guarantee. In December of 2011, when Say Yes to Education, the national non-profit organization, announced it was coming to Buffalo, they promised that every student who graduates from Buffalo Public Schools would be eligible for free tuition at any state 2-year or 4-year college or university or equivalent support at a network of private colleges. To qualify for this last-dollar tuition guarantee, students must complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), the New York State Tuition Assistance Program (TAP) application, and an online registration form for Say Yes. In this paper, I examine the effects of an intervention designed to help students and families complete the financial aid application process and effectively maintain their eligibility for the tuition guarantee. In the process, I address two key questions:


The first question is the focus of the empirical analysis of this paper, while the second question provides an opportunity to think about the underlying collaboration that made the FAFSA completion project possible.

Buffalo is part of a region in the U.S. known as the rust belt, which was essential to the steel and automobile industries through the middle of the 20th century. It earned the name because it represented the literal and figurative decay of the community, as many steel-producing industries were exported to nations with lower production costs. In many ways, the new period of populist nationalism in the U.S. is in response to the failings of neoliberal policies during a period of globalization. Populism in the U.S. context was complicated by our struggles to reconcile our history of racism rooted in the slave trade during our nation's founding. Moreover, we witnessed evidence of this during the COVID-19 pandemic when decisions to ban travel from Muslims and East Asian countries were fueled, at least in part, by ethnocentrism and xenophobia. These debates continue as we struggle to redefine our immigration policies as migrants from Mexico and the nations in South and Central America seek refuge on our Southern border.

Buffalo is a symbol, in many ways, of the challenges and opportunities facing the U.S. in the post-neoliberal transition. The city suffered significant economic challenges due to globalization, the decline of the steel industry, and the subsequent white and middle-class flight from the city center to the first and second-ring suburbs, beginning during the civil rights era and the desegregation of schools. Today, Buffalo serves as a refugee resettlement community on the Northern border with Canada. In recent years, the city experienced modest population growth, primarily attributable to the influx of refugees from across the globe. Today, the city is home to a majority-minority population, where slightly less than 45% of the population identifies as White. The remaining population is comprised of Black and African American (33.3%), Hispanic or Latinx (12.2%), Asian (6.7%), and residents of two or more races (5.9%). Additionally, students in the Buffalo Public School (BPS) system speak 82 different languages, and more than 19% identify as English language learners [5], which indicates the role immigration played in the resurgence of the city of Buffalo.

In the next section, I describe the work of Say Yes to Education—Buffalo and describe their role using the Human Capabilities Framework as St. John described earlier in this volume. Say Yes is a community-based strategy modeled after several place-based promise programs designed to leverage the benefits of postsecondary education for local economic growth. Hundreds of communities across the country considered launching similar initiatives and dozens developed some variation of a place-based tuition guarantee program [6], only a few of which were as successful as Buffalo. I review relevant literature examining these community-based strategies to improve student outcomes in this section. The third section describes the FAFSA Completion Project and its role in providing a communitybased strategy to promote postsecondary opportunities. Many researchers noted that the rising cost of higher education in the U.S. became a significant barrier for low-income, first-generation, and racially minoritized students [7–12], and several identified the complexity of the financial aid application process as a contributing factor [13–21]. The research literature is mixed on the effectiveness of existing strategies to improve the financial aid application process. The intervention we examine responds to the work being carried out to simplify the financial aid application process in the U.S. and focuses more on helping families navigate the complexity rather than simplifying the process. The fourth section reports on the results of the intervention and the implications of the work in terms of the broader educational and economic development goals of Buffalo and the Western New York region. In the final section, we reflect on the implications of this work for local communities situated in other national contexts.
