Cohorts of young Australians have been told they have to study longer, work harder, eschew avocado and marry better if they want the chance to buy a home of their own.

Nearly 2.5 million people owed the Australian government almost $49 billion in HELP debts in 2015-16. The average student debt in 2016-17 had risen to $19,100, and took almost nine years to repay.

But in the US, where fees are less regulated and student debt is approaching $1.5 trillion, some students are being "offered" a new college fee financing technique known as "income sharing".

Instead of repaying the principal and interest on a loan, a student can agree to give up a share of their graduate incomes for a certain number of years.

Its recent introduction comes about from a combination of growing student debt default (running at over 10 per cent), and financial interest in getting access to this large financial market.

Income sharing is promoted as a "responsible" and lower risk form of education financing. Instead of a debt that may never be repaid, income sharing claims a known proportion of your future income for a fixed period of time, when the contract is terminated. Effectively this is a debt for equity swap.

A form of ownership over graduates

In an Australian context, income sharing would be a way of privatising taxation and giving governments a way to exit higher education funding altogether, in favour of financial institutions, at a cost.

One cost would be that it creates effectively a form of ownership over graduates, akin to "debt bondage", which is seen by the UN and International Labor Organisation as a form of "modern day slavery".

With income sharing, however, the bondage relationship is both divided (you are selling only a share of your income) and distributed (between the owner of the share of your income and the employer who pays you the income).

The Human Stock Exchange is a sort of sci-fi parody of the growth of finance in our everyday lives and ways of thinking. ( Supplied )

Does a state of partial slavery make one a slave? And what degree of control would you be expected to give to a shareholder in your earning capacity?

Many commercial contracts contain performance benchmarks and provide for penalties if these are not met.

If the owner of your income share cannot repossess — well, you — what provisions would they like to see in the contract to make sure you perform in a way that maximises their profits?

Our lives could be priced like a company's shares

Income sharing is currently only occurring in the US and only for student fees, but like the income contingent loans schemes like HECS or HELP, the model clearly can expand to cover other major financial commitments, like housing, health insurance or child care.

With income sharing, finance stands to make money from and assert further control over our human experience.

Practices like income sharing set up the possibility of an actual Human Stock Exchange to trade these shares. ( Flickr: /j.o.h.n.walker )

Their investment is not in the individual student or household, who could fail to turn a profit for them, (although in practice corporations would try to refuse to fund or risk manage those judged likely to fail).

The profitability comes from aggregating life's experience and the work effort of millions of individuals and households.

In this way too, our lives could also be priced like a company's shares. The student income shares could be on-sold, as is the case with household mortgage payments now.

Practices like income sharing set up the possibility of an actual human stock exchange to trade these shares.

Financial institutions are always interested in investing in income streams to diversify their investment portfolio.

In so doing they would be able to put a price on something they have usually seen as an inconvenient factor of production — people and their capacity to work.

Almost 15 years ago now Nobel laureate Robert Shiller noted that financial market innovation was targeting households, because that is where most of income and wealth is held.

Wherever there is money to be made, there exists the potential for financial trading.

The 20th century saw the development of trade unionism as a collective response to industrialisation.

We are now being challenged to find the organisational forms that respond to our collective experience of exposure to financial risk.

Mike Rafferty is an academic at RMIT University and co-author with Dick Bryan of the newly published book, Risking Together — How Finance is Dominating Everyday Life in Australia, published by Sydney University Press.