The Financialization of Higher Education: Student Debt and Institutional Borrowing 2000 to 2010.

Since the 1980s, returns on lending and financial investments have accounted for a fast increasing share of profits in the U.S. economy - a process that scholars have termed financialization. Yet despite growing sociological awareness about the broad reach of this transformation, we actually know very little about the extent to which financialization has occurred beyond the corporate sector. In this paper, we leverage a unique new dataset to provide the first systematic accounting of financialization within the U.S. higher education sector. We quantitatively document the scale, scope, and contours by which different sub-sectors of higher education are funded through financial debt instruments. We also generate estimates of the extent to which the transaction costs built into this system have allowed the financial sector to capture a growing portion of higher education spending by the state, higher education institutions, and households. Our preliminary analysis uses data ending in 2010 and beginning in 2000 for student debt and beginning in 2002 for institutional borrowing. We show accumulation to the financial sector has increased in 2010 constant dollars both from interest paid on consumer loans for students and from debts incurred by higher education institutions. We detail how we will extend our dataset to earlier years and forward through at least 2011 with further enhancements and additional analysis prior to the August 2014 ASA annual meeting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]