The 2% Problem: Why the People Who Want to Back a Student Almost Never Do

Here is a number that should bother anyone who has ever wanted to help a young person in their family get through school: across all of college funding, relatives other than parents cover only about 2% of the cost. Parents carry roughly 45%. Everyone else combined — the grandparents, the aunt who calls on every birthday, the uncle who paid for the SAT prep course, the godmother, the family friend who has known the kid since they were in diapers — adds up to about two cents on the dollar.

That number is not a measure of how much those people care. Anyone who has watched a grandparent at a graduation knows the care is not the missing ingredient. The 2% is a measure of something else: there has never been a dignified, structured way for that wider circle to participate. The will is there. The mechanism isn't.

This is the gap My Study Fund was built to close. Not the gap between aid and tuition — there are loans and payment plans for that, however imperfect. The gap between the people who would gladly back a student and any decent way to do it.

Why the 2% stays stuck

Think about how support actually reaches a student today. The parents pay what they can. When there's still a shortfall, the conversation usually goes one of three directions, and none of them reaches the wider circle.

The first is debt. The family takes a Parent PLUS loan or a private loan, and the gap gets quietly absorbed by one or two people. Since July 1, 2026, that option has shrunk: a federal cap now limits Parent PLUS borrowing to $20,000 a year and $65,000 over a student's whole degree, and loans taken after that date have lost access to income-driven repayment. Even the institution most relied on to paper over the gap has been narrowed. Brookings, looking at the cap, made the obvious point: limiting how much families can borrow doesn't make college cost less — it just relocates the gap onto the family to solve some other way.

The second direction is the awkward individual ask. A parent texts their sister. A student musters the courage to bring it up with a grandparent. These work, sometimes, but they don't scale past the two or three closest people, and every one of them costs the asker something emotionally. Nobody enjoys it. So most of the circle never gets asked at all.

The third is the crisis page. The family puts up a GoFundMe. And here the numbers tell the whole story. Across roughly 100,000 education fundraisers, GoFundMe campaigns raise about $70 million a year — which sounds like a lot until you do the division: the average college fundraiser brings in around $2,000, once. It's shaped like an emergency, because the platform is shaped like an emergency. It treats four years of a young adult's life as a single bad moment to be rescued from. People give once, the page goes quiet, and the relationship the giving could have built never forms.

Notice what all three have in common: none of them turns the wider circle into ongoing participants. Debt isolates the gap onto one payer. The individual ask doesn't scale. The crisis page collects a one-time check and closes the door. The 2% stays at 2% because the only tools available are built for a transaction, not a relationship.

What the circle would actually do, if you let them

Now run the math the other way. Picture one grandparent who sets up $25 a month toward a grandchild's education. Nobody calls $25 a sacrifice. But across a four-year degree, that one grandparent has quietly contributed $1,200 — already more than half of what the average GoFundMe campaign raises from everyone combined, and it arrived as a steady part of the student's life rather than a one-time rescue.

Now add the aunt at $15 a month, the family friend at $20, the uncle at $25. None of them is straining. None of them was ever going to initiate. But together, as recurring backers across the years that actually matter, they don't add up to 2% of the cost. They add up to a meaningfully funded education — and a student who spent four years feeling backed instead of bailed out.

That is the entire thesis. The money to close the gap mostly already exists inside these families. It is sitting in the wallets of people who would say yes in a heartbeat if asked the right way, in the right amount, at the right cadence. The reason it never moves is that the only options on the table are give a large amount once or don't give at all. Almost everyone, faced with that choice, picks "not right now."

The thing the platform actually changes

So what does a Fund Page do that a text thread or a crisis page doesn't? Three things, and they're all about lowering the cost of participating to nearly zero.

It makes the amount small and recurring instead of large and one-time. A supporter isn't deciding whether to write a $1,000 check; they're deciding whether to back someone they love for $20 a month, which is a different and far easier decision. Recurring support also compounds in a way one-time giving never can — and it keeps the supporter connected to the story rather than closing the book after a single transaction.

It makes the second share effortless. Most of a student's wider circle isn't reachable by the student — it's reachable by the parent. The parent's network is older, larger, and more able to give than the student's. A Fund Page is built so a parent can forward it to their own people without having to make the ask personally awkward, and without putting the student in the position of looking like they're begging.

And it keeps everyone connected to the story. Supporters get real updates — a first day, a hard exam survived, a clinical rotation, a final grade. The giving stops being a one-way transaction and becomes participation in something. That's the part that makes a grandparent renew for a second year without being asked, and the part no one-time page can manufacture.

None of this requires anyone to give more than they comfortably can. It just requires a way for the 98% of the circle that currently gives nothing — not from indifference, but from the absence of any decent mechanism — to give a little, steadily, with dignity intact on both sides.

The shift worth making

The cap that arrived on July 1 has pushed a lot of families toward the same tired menu: borrow more (now harder), ask awkwardly (still awkward), or post a crisis page (still a $2,000 one-time average). The families who do better are the ones who stop trying to solve the gap with a single large source and start letting their whole circle carry a small steady piece of it.

The 2% was never a ceiling on how much people are willing to do. It was a measure of how badly the tools failed them. Give the circle a real way to show up, in amounts that don't sting, across the years that matter, and the number doesn't have to stay at two cents on the dollar.

If you're a parent staring at the gap after this year's aid, the most useful thing you can do isn't to find one big source. It's to make it easy for the ten people who already love your kid to each carry a little of it. That's a Fund Page. That's the whole idea.

My Study Fund is an education investment platform: students publish a Fund Page, and the people who believe in them back the journey with one-off or monthly support — paid out securely through Stripe, directly to the student. If you want to see where the Parent PLUS cap leaves your family, the Parent PLUS Gap Calculator shows your number in about a minute.