Life Capital

Attempts to re-align incentives in education have fallen into two main categories: income share agreements (ISAs) and equity investments.

In the unbundled model, which we seem to be moving towards, there is a wide variety of agents across the value chain that work with one another: the financing is provided by external issuers (like Leif) that take care of the ISAs, the content could be open-sourced (like the Odin Project), the community shared by students across different programs (... See more

Social tokens, Lambda School, Pipe: all of these capitalize potential money-makers upfront based on expected future earnings, and in doing so, actually increase the probability of financial success by giving them money to invest.

Programs like Pathstream help upskill people into tech jobs. OnDeck is building an onramp for entrepreneurs to find cofounders, fund themselves, and even obtain healthcare while they build. ISAs are nudging the putrescent education establishment towards positive ROIs for students.

Social capital, on the other hand, is harder to define and relies on the creation of a “successful status game.”