افزایش مبانی اجتماعی تحصیلات عالی: درسهایی از گسترش یک سیستم پشتیبانی اجتماعی با یک طرح وام در رابطه با  تقسیم ریسک در پرتغال  Enlarging the social basis of higher education: Lessons learned from extending a social support system with  a risk-sharing loan scheme in Portugal

1. Introduction The underlying assumptions of this article are that students matter and that the foremost purpose of government increases in funding for tertiary education is to increase participation rates and extend its recruitment base (Barr, 2004, Heitor, 2008; Phelps, 2013). Consequently, student support mechanisms aimed at the diversification of student income sources are critical in fostering student participation in tertiary education and contributing to the qualification of the labor force (Kallison and Cohen, 2010). The question to be addressed is, how can different incentives and funding mechanisms developed in modern fi- nancial markets during the last decade be adapted and used to attract more people to tertiary education? There are two key interrelated issues. The first relates to the diversi- fication of income sources for students. It also refers to efforts to increase and balance the offer of loans and grants and their use by students. The second is associated with the development of innovative loan systems and their combination with flexible legislation to foster student income. This article addresses both issues and is motivated by the need to expand the social basis of tertiary education students in times of increasing uncertainty. It examines the introduction of student loans in Portugal aimed at complementing the relatively large existing support program of social grants and in a context of severe public budget constraints. Nicholas Barr (2008), among other scholars, argues that it is important to guarantee that graduates (not students) share the costs of education. Although this argument merits praise for promoting access to tertiary education, the long-term benefits – or constraints – of such a policy are contingent on the developmental stages of higher education systems, the social and economic backgrounds of graduates, and post-graduation employment and earning prospects (Chapman and Liu, 2013; Chapman et al., 2010). Still, the main issue is that the correct cost-balance to be shared between taxpayers, graduates, and other private sources, has still to be determined, with well-known consequences for the most economically disadvantaged (Barr and Crawford, 2005). Additionally, the current trend in mass and universal higher education systems is one of the decreasing investments by the state – unable to cope with the costs – vis a vis the investment of families and students (Sanyal and Johnstone, 2011). In this context, students in many economic contexts are being asked to raise financial resources to respond better to all the challenges and costs of their academic life (including indirect costs), namely through loan systems, preferably without being over-burdened by loan repayment after graduation (Rothstein and Rouse, 2011).