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Department of Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics

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Higher education as a portfolio investment: students' choices about studying, term time employment, leisure, and loans

By Jim Pemberton, Sarah Jewell, Alessandra Faggian and Zella King. Published in the journal Oxford Economic Papers.

Recent UK changes in the number of students entering higher education, and in the nature of financial support, highlight the complexity of students’ choices about human capital investments. Today’s students have to focus not on the relatively narrow issue of how much academic effort to invest, but instead on the more complicated issue of how to invest effort in pursuit of ‘employability skills’, and how to signal such acquisitions in the context of a highly competitive graduate jobs market. We propose a framework aimed specifically at students’ investment decisions, which encompasses corner solutions for both borrowing and employment while studying.

Publication type: 
Journal article
Date published: 
Monday, April 15, 2013