Financing the Future

Our Vision

Jobs for the Future’s Financing the Future (FTF) initiative is working to reimagine financing for postsecondary education and skills development. Launched in 2020, FTF takes a big-tent approach, bringing together perspectives from across a spectrum of stakeholders, including educators, policymakers, investors, philanthropic organizations, employers, and students themselves. By spurring conversation and action to understand and advance an array of innovative financing options, Financing the Future is cultivating an education financing ecosystem that promotes opportunity and equity.

A key driver of the dysfunction in the education and workforce systems resides in how the system expects learners to pay for the rising cost of education and training, which exhibits four specific problems:

1. A lack of accountability. While many colleges and training providers offer high-quality programs, outcomes vary. Some schools and programs even leave learners worse off—but they get paid regardless of students’ outcomes.
2. Limited access. Many learners don’t have access to financing options that would help them pay for education and training. They may have exhausted their traditional loan options or may not qualify for existing federal aid programs. Or they may be interested in pursuing short-term career and technical training programs, which are often ineligible for federal aid programs.
3. Unaffordability. Even if students can access financing, they may not be able to afford the debt they will incur. That’s especially true for those who don’t complete their educations or who can’t find a well-paying job after completion.
4. A lack of equity. Each of these aforementioned problems can have a disproportionate impact on members of certain populations, including Black, Latine, and Indigenous learners, first-generation college students, and people from low-income backgrounds.

New and innovative approaches to financing education and training investments can be an important part of the solution. These approaches represent new ways to spread the costs and risks of these investments across a variety of stakeholders and entities, including education providers, employers, state and federal governments, community-based organizations, and private investors.

We focus on five categories of innovative finance: outcome-based financing, pay for success partnerships, lifelong learning accounts, employer training incentives, and employment-connected training.

The Promise of Innovative Financing: More—and Improved—Postsecondary Learning Opportunities

At JFF, we believe adoption of innovative financing can lead to more people receiving education and training while also driving improvements in the quality and equity of the postsecondary education and training system.

These models can induce more people to pursue education and training in three ways: first, by expanding access to financing options to individuals who face financing gaps or want to pursue short-term career and technical programs; second, by offering lower-risk financing in which payments are only required when graduates get well-paid jobs; and third, by leveraging contributions from employers, philanthropies, investors, government programs, and schools, which reduces the overall cost to the student. These same entities will also have a greater incentive to expand the supply of education and training options, creating a larger and more diverse market.

Adoption of these models can also lead to broader improvements in the education and training system. For example, outcomes- and performance-based financing vehicles can align schools’ and training providers’ financial incentives with their students’ post-graduation earnings, thus encouraging them to invest in efforts to improve education quality, offer wraparound services to ensure completion, and build career pathways to local employers. Moreover, by making education free to learners or adjusting learners’ repayments to better match their earnings, innovative financing can make education and training more affordable. And by expanding access to and improving the quality and affordability of education, innovative financing can advance racial and socio-economic equity.

	Inform
While the evidence of the value of innovative financing has grown in recent years, significant gaps in stakeholders’ understanding of this emerging industry remain. Financing the Future aims to fill those gaps by elevating, supporting, and publishing research into how these models work in practice and the impact they have. We also track the models’ evolution and performance, offer insights into their equity implications, and highlight learner experiences.
	Guide
Innovative financing tools have enormous potential to help learners advance in their education and careers. But like any tool, they must be used the right way to unlock that potential. We work with schools, nonprofits, philanthropic organizations, employers, investors, and policymakers to promote the adoption of best practices and establish quality standards to ensure that these tools are designed and deployed to effectively and equitably advance student welfare.
	Cultivate
Innovative financing tools don’t exist in a vacuum. Their benefits to learners are, in part, dependent on the environment in which they operate. We work to build an ecosystem that fosters experimentation and promotes consumer protections by expanding access to transparent data on student and borrower outcomes, facilitating the sharing of knowledge about what works and what doesn’t work, and driving a public discourse grounded in empirical research and awareness of student experiences.

JFF aims to promote innovative solutions that have evidence-based track records of success and have the potential to truly transform the U.S. education and training system. By planting and nurturing the seeds of these new models, building an ecosystem in which they can flourish, and studying the outcomes they yield, we hope to identify solutions that can scale to expand economic advancement opportunities for all.