Skin in the Game: Wall Street’s answer to the student-debt crisis

From one angle, ISAs are just a new form of private debt. Students promise to relinquish some amount of their future wages—a limited term of indentured servitude. But ISAs grew out of a particular free-market ideology, and their proponents often return to two refrains: the importance of “aligning incentives,” and of ensuring both parties have “skin in the game.” The theory is that educational institutions don’t have enough of a stake in the success of their graduates. Once alumni enter the labor market, schools are off the hook. But if universities, training academies, and coding boot camps got paid only after students secured a job, the market would compel them to better prepare students for the workforce.

Read more at www.harpers.org . . .