Developing New Financing Instruments for Iran’s Higher Education System (Case Study: Mortgage Securities Model)

Abstract

Optimizing the financing of Iran's higher education system faces major challenges such as smallness of the private sector, lack of a competitive market in knowledge production, the state's small role in higher education, and also the absence of new financial instruments in the capital market along with the development of the money market. As a result, the most important financing resources and major clients of academic research projects are state-run organizations, which also raise finance through tuition. Apparently, there are a few reasons why the higher education system should change its financing methods to achieve great goals. These reasons include intensified economic sanctions, declined capacity of the state to finance this sector, decreased power of families and firms to cover educational and research expenses through private budgets, and the necessity of making higher education expenses efficient with respect to the need to train the future workforce. The method of this study is a descriptive-qualitative, which was carried out in two stages of the library and the implementation of the Delphi method by referring to 20 experts. Aiming to introduce new instruments to make banking asset-backed securities (of facilities type) to education and research clients (families and firms), this study seeks to prove the hypothesis that the mortgage-backed securities can be employed to achieve the following goals. The first goal is to grant facilities to the students who are financially unable to pay tuition. This relieves the pressure on the Students Welfare Fund. The second goal is to grant business financing facilities to talented students. Finally, the third goal is to finance the firms that have research needs but are unable to cover the expenses through their revenues. Regarding 17 indicators, the research findings indicate that experts reached a consensus (Kendall's W= 0.702).