Survey Results

Income share agreements began to gain traction during the last decade, and has garnered enough attention to receive full roll-outs at institutions such as Purdue University in 2016, University of Utah in 2019, and most recently the Flywheel Fund at Stanford Law in 2021. Federally, income-based repayments such as SAVE & REPAYE have utilized a similar mechanism to protect student borrowers. Although some of the past programs have been closed amid regulatory unease and servicer scandals, the concept remains popular as a way to peg a college education’s worth to student outcomes. The Basis Zero is a significant departure from traditional income share agreements, since it does not attempt to make a profit or even break even. Instead, it can be thought of as a grant with variable recuperation. Students never pay more than the amount loaned to them. 

To truly evaluate how the Basis Zero might be received, we partnered with Qualtrics to conduct a survey on 1000 qualified respondents. We gathered educational background information, income, and their grants aid and borrowed loan sums for college. At the end, we pitched them the Basis Zero product through various scenarios and asked them to rank preference between the product and a repaymentless grant of lower sum. We quantify our findings below: