'Human capital contracts' transfer financial risk of higher education from students to investors.

Autorentext
Miguel Palacios Lleras is a Fellow at the Batten Institute, Darden School of Business Administration at the University of Virginia. He is the author of numerous papers on financing human capital and is co-founder of Lumni, a company that manages human capital funds.

Klappentext

Most higher education finance literature assumes that students cannot pledge their future earnings to finance their education in a free society. Investing in Human Capital challenges that assumption and explores human capital contracts as an alternative mechanism for financing higher education. Investing in Human Capital tracks the roots of the idea behind human capital contracts, discusses the beneficial consequences they would have on students and on higher education markets, and describes how they can develop in light of the innovations that have taken place in financial markets during the last decades. The book also explores the challenges - ethical and financial - that such instruments face and offers implementation alternatives that can bring about their existence in the context of a national higher education financing program.

Zusammenfassung
Investing in Human Capital, first published in 2004, argues for 'human capital contracts' where students agree to pay a percentage of their income in exchange for funds to finance their education. The financial consequences - risk transfer from students to investors and increased information regarding future graduates' earnings - offers an alternative for funding higher education.

Inhalt
List of figures; List of tables; Foreword; Acknowledgements; Introduction; Part I. The Problem of Financing Education: 1. The value of education; 2. Market failure in the financing of education; 3. The need for alternatives to traditional funding; Part II. Equity-Like Investments to Finance Education: 4. The evolution of human capital contracts; 5. How human capital contracts work; 6. The case for human capital contracts; 7. Human capital options; Part III. Implementing Human Capital Contracts: 8. Hurdles in the implementation of human capital contracts; 9. Lessons from the implementation of income-contingent loans; 10. Government-driven implementation of human capital contracts; 11. Conclusion; Appendices; Notes; References; Index.