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The UK's only independent think tank devoted to higher education.

Blog

The HEPI Blog aims to make brief, incisive contributions to the higher education policy landscape. It is circulated to our subscribers and published online. We welcome guest submissions, which should follow our Instructions for Blog Authors. Submissions should be sent to our Blog Editor, Josh Freeman, at [email protected].

  • At Amber: The financial position of UK universities

    13 January 2024 by Nick Hillman

    On Christmas Day, my family gave me a lovely new fountain pen (made out of recycled plectrums by this master craftsman since you ask). There was one other thing at the top of my Christmas wish list too, although – unlike the pen – it has only just arrived. I am referring…

  • The role for higher education in combatting AI misinformation

    12 January 2024 by Sahil Shah and Ari Soonawalla

    What have recent changes in AI been? Rapid advances in AI have greatly improved its capabilities across content generation and sentiment analysis. By drastically pushing down the costs, they have also reduced barriers to entry. Machine learning is making social media monitoring, text and sentiment analysis much more powerful, allowing…

  • Universities are not what they used to be. And thank goodness for that

    11 January 2024 by Amanda Broderick

    The date is 2018. The balancing influence of HEFCE’s cooperating bodies has been broken up and institutions are registering to the new, sole regulator of English Higher Education, the Office for Students. Pre-Graduate Outcome Survey, pre-B3 conditions, pre-Covid, pre-ChatGPT4, we’re still in the EU, annual gross domestic product is 1.4%…

  • A Browne Levy on Overseas Student Fees

    10 January 2024 by Jeff Frank and Norman Gowar

    HEPI has published the third version of its analysis of the economic benefits of our universities hosting overseas students.  It finds a substantially increased gross benefit, £41.9 billion, to the UK economy arising from the 2021/22 cohort.  This is associated with a rise in overseas student numbers of 40% in…

  • Taking a global view of UK international education policy

    9 January 2024 by Ian Crichton

    For the past year, I have been privileged to lead a global provider of international education. We work with universities around the world to help increase global participation and I am deeply proud of the outstanding education taken up by students ambitious for their studies and their futures. Most of…

  • Navigating the AI revolution in higher education: a call to action

    5 January 2024 by Yike Guo

    Back in 1937 HG Wells, a man who knew a little of the future and the challenges it holds, warned that ‘our universities are not half-way out of the 15th century’ as he berated them for their inability to move with the times. What would he say to them now…

  • The regulation of student education: are the quality wars back?

    4 January 2024 by Roger Brown

    As a scarred veteran of the so called ‘quality wars’ – seemingly endless disputes from the mid-80s to the late-90s about the shape and control of the regulation of student education – the author has been sufficiently piqued by the House of Lords Committee’s remarkable criticisms of the Office for…

  • Higher education should be central to the international development agenda

    3 January 2024 by Colin Riordan

    On 20 November, at the Global Food Security Summit in London, the Government launched a White Paper on international development entitled ‘International development in a contested world: ending extreme poverty and tackling climate change’. Much of what was outlined in the paper is welcome, including a commitment to scaling up…