Reading this…it got me in my feelings. There’s something fundamentally wrong to me with this.
College Grads Sell Stakes in Themselves to Wall Street
Instead of taking out loans, students can agree to hand over part of their future earnings in return for investment.
By Claire Boston
To pay for college, Amy Wroblewski sold a piece of her future. Every month, for eight-and-a-half years, she must turn over a set percentage of her salary to investors. Today, about a year after graduation, Wroblewski makes $50,000 a year as a higher education recruiter in Winchester, Va. So the cut comes to $279 a month, less than her car payment.
If the 23-year-old becomes a star in her field, she could pay twice as much. If she loses her job, she won’t have to pay anything, and investors will be out of luck until she finds work.
Wroblewski struck this unusual deal as an undergraduate at public Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind. To fund part of the cost of her degree in strategy and organizational management, she sidestepped the common source of money, a student loan. Instead, she agreed to hand over part of her future earnings through a new kind of financial instrument called an income-sharing agreement, or ISA. In a sense, financiers are transforming student debtors into stock investments, with much of the same risk and, ideally, return.
In Wall Street terms, Wroblewski, a first-generation college student, is more small-company stock than Microsoft.
Those qualities impressed a company called Vemo Education, which vets students at Purdue and a handful of other schools on behalf of potential investors. More important, perhaps, Wroblewski believes in herself and her ability to make good on the contract. “Even with all my other loans, I knew I could make it work,” says Wroblewski.
Americans owe $1.5 trillion in higher education debt, a burden that weighs down their dreams and the U.S. economy. The Federal Reserve says millennials are now less likely to buy homes than young people were in 2005, and even senior citizens find themselves still making payments on their student loans.
How is it these white men think they can trampled on Black women to get a laugh? Matt Whitaker did it to Sheila Jackson Lee and now Steve Mnuchin is with this fuckery. Black women don’t play that shyt. You will get checked big time. You’d think Steve Mnuchin would have learned from the last encounter with Maxine Waters but no. He tried again and failed. We don’t have the patience for nonsense. Don’t try us!
