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- you're competing with student loans as a choice of funding; for a student to pick your investment over a student loan it has to be a better offer. For any student that anticipates serious success you'll have a hard time being a better offer in terms of net payout; student loans are painful b/c their payback is frontloaded into the postgraduation years, which are at the point of the lowest lifetime earnings potential...but in net amount 3% of lifetime earnings will be much greater than the total amount of student loan payments.

- most of the really talented individuals won't even need your money, as there's an unbelievable wealth of grants and scholarships and fellowships for the truly exceptional in all walks of life (science, music, athletics, etc.) that they pretty much don't need funding until after they graduate. After graduation they might take you up on the offer but as time passes they become ever-more-likely to be able to raise cheaper funding for whatever they desire

You're making the assumption that the person would choose to use the money on schooling. Student loans come with that terrible string attached. This investment would not.

This is a valid point, and a helpful one also.

Keep in mind that I'm already ruling out people with substantial established track records of prior accomplishment, leaving you with:

- people mid 30s or older without any kind of track record to speak of (UNLIKELY TO BE A GOOD INVESTMENT!)

- kids in the 18-25 y/o bracket, eg old enough to sign a contract but not-yet with a track record

So if we have someone 18-25 with a tangible track record (eg: successful software / website / invention / artistic performance record / etc.) they're out of the picture; we're left with 18-25 y/o's with promise but nothing else.

In most fields it's not impossible to pull off a huge success without the training acquired in at least an undergraduate program but it's very unlikely in most scientific fields (and if you were the type who could do it you'd probably also already have enough of a tangible track record that you'd not really be part of the group we're considering atm anyways).

EG: you're almost certainly not going to do anything significant in biology or medicine or chemistry or engineering or materials science or semiconductors or optoelectronics (and even football and basketball) without the training usually acquired as an undergrad (let alone in grad school).

So yeah: the money not being tied to college would have its appeal but putting on the investor's hat for a second someone without a plan for acquiring that level of training looks like a bad bet unless there are further mitigating factors.

Which is why I think the assumption is still mostly warranted, even if it shouldn't be taken for granted (as it was in my previous response).

But, what is helpful is this points in the direction of selecting candidates who would benefit from this program: musicians and other artists.

In many musical + artistic genres a couple hundred upfront in exchange for a cut of lifetime earnings is much better than the deal they typically get now. There's not necessarily a ton of fledgling artists out there who'd actually be good investments but it's a niche where the offer may make a fair amount of sense from both sides.

Essentially you should be asking: what potentially-highly-remunerative "career paths" are (a) open to people in their early-mid 20s and (b) such that star talents exist and (c) such that star talents would find this type of investing a better option than their existing funding options.

you're almost certainly not going to do anything significant in biology or medicine or chemistry or engineering or materials science or semiconductors or optoelectronics (and even football and basketball) without the training usually acquired as an undergrad (let alone in grad school).

Perhaps this is a direct consequence of the lack of alternative funding? Our society is structured in such a way that you're expected to be doing one of two things at all times: work or school. If you choose to spend time exploring the world in your own way, you're seen as wasting your time and given no support by anyone. As a consequence, this is rarely a feasible choice.

Opportunities such as these are extraordinarily rare, but we have essentially no modern data on how people who have such opportunities fare.

That said, we do have historical data: virtually all academic progress (scientific, philosophical, etc.) has historically been made by the aristocracy -- by people who could spend their time "being idle", neither working nor schooling, and think about big problems.

Eh, I don't think the reason you don't see 18 y/o people doing significant work in materials science isn't directly the lack of alternate funding; it's that there's no alternate funding for 18 y/o to do materials science b/c without proper background training they're unlikely to make any material progress in the field.

This is the same reason there's no "alternate funding" for bright but undistinguished 45-y/o people with no prior background in materials science to go and do materials science (short of education loans for late-life career changers); it's a field that requires lots of education (in the sense of learning) and specialized skills and someone without those skills isn't likely to accomplish anything on the investment.

Generally yes: advances come when you pair motivation to investigate topics of interest with freedom from more-mundane considerations and access to the necessary resources to make advances (idleness, if you will); as the frontiers of most applied sciences have gotten out of the reach of what wealthy dilettantes can easily afford you don't see them making many advances (but you do see plenty of advances in industry and academia, still, both of which allow their researchers enough of those things to make advances and both of which -- unlike most wealthy individuals -- can afford the tools many times over again).

Please note that I was careful to say that the prospective 18 y/o outsider materials scientist (or what have you) needed the training usually acquired in a university context; I deliberately did not say that they needed a university education.

It seems that for most bright-and-motivated types they could easily accelerate that training substantially if they had more freedom to choose courses a-la-carte; the loans-for-college approach currently doesn't allow for that kind of discretion, but a more financially-secure student would be better-placed to negotiate that.

All that being said: there's almost no way that someone without the equivalent of that kind of training in an applied science will make material contributions to that field; at present economic constraints make it very hard to obtain even the equivalent of that training short of actually going to school and getting a degree (at which entails putting up with all the bs and time-wasting stuff that that entails).

Unlike a student loan, I could simply refuse to pay back the 3%. In the relatively unlikely case a court held the contract valid, I could shed it in bankruptcy.

The downside case is much better with the "3% equity in a person" investment than a student loan.

You're right, I didn't want to broach enforceability issues but you're right.

If true it'd only further contribute to the adverse selection effect: the ability to easily shuck the obligation will do more to draw out people you don't want to invest in than to ring in superstars who otherwise might say no.

If it was structured correctly, you wouldn't take a tax haircut on the 250k. (You don't pay taxes on the proceeds when you get a loan, e.g.)

You might think so, but there's not an existing legal framework for receiving equity investment as an individual.

If it were that easy people would already be getting around gift tax and estate tax by investing $millions in their kids in exchange for .01% of future annual income, initial payments deferred 15 years (and transferring as part of the estate) and and so on.