Higher education can be financed privately, financed by governments, or shared. Given that the benefits of education accrue to the individual and the state, many governments opt for shared financing. This article examines the underpinnings of different options for financing higher education and develops a model to compare conditions to choices and outcomes. As an illustration, it then uses the Jamaican experience of the past four decades to demonstrate outcomes. This demonstrates that, for political reasons, there were adverse outcomes, including infrastructural neglect, enrolment decline, threats to programme quality and financial difficulties but also that many of these outcomes should have been foreseen.