The key question around the world over the issue of higher education financing policy has been‘who should pay for the higher education? . In this paper, beyond the long-standing discussion on this question from egalitarian and liberal perspective, and also from those regarding higher education as public goods or private goods, we approached this issue with the view that higher education is discretionary public goods and argued that ‘higher education financing policies should target those who are in need, and be developed in a way to improve the lifetime income of the worst-off students’, which is in line with the argument of social just theory. To approach empirically, the higher education policies of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan are analyzed, all of which are grouped as countries with high level of dependency on private sector rather than the public sector in higher education budget. We particularly focused on whether these policies exert distinctive efforts to improve social justice of the society by providing actual help to the worst-off. The findings showed that even though countries seemed to make such efforts, contradictory results were seen in reality. The newly adopted income-contingent model of the UK, however, seemed to hold implications regarding social justice perspective. We also shed light on the importance of financing autonomy of institutions, and the role of government in the era of education consumerism.