As 2024 draws to a close, Josh Freeman, Policy Manager, and the HEPI team look back on a remarkable year in higher education policy.
We have a fantastic programme of events to look forward to in 2025, which you can read all about here.
One of the best things about working at HEPI is that we can take a bird’s eye view of the sector. Today, we gaze over quite a different policy landscape from the one I wrote about this time last year. We have a new Government which, unlike the last one, is not afraid to raise tuition fees. The Graduate Route visa survived in its current form, largely because of the international fee income it helps bring to struggling institutions. Universities UK published its Blueprint, proving it is possible to get 140 vice-chancellors (or thereabouts) to agree on something. Despite all this, nothing seems to stop the interminable slide into financial precarity with up to three-quarters of institutions at risk of running deficits in 2025.
It has been a privilege to capture many of these moments and more on the HEPI blog, which had another exceptionally busy year. As we approach the end of 2024, the HEPI team reflects on the pieces which set the tone for the year, struck a chord in institutions, led policy change or were just a great read.
Winter
In January, we heard from Laura Coryton MBE about period poverty in higher education, the stigma attached to it and the strategies institutions can take to address it. HEPI intern Famke Veenstra-Ashmore also discussed this issue, among many others, in her report on the gender awarding gap at Oxbridge in November.
Richard Courtney of the University of East London won the prize for best analogy of the year with his comparison of a Chinese meal to higher education qualification types in February.
And HEPI published its best-read report of the year, Provide or punish? Students’ views on generative AI in higher education. (Watch out for an update in early 2025!) Our other top reports of the year include:
- constituency-level data on the benefits of international students by London Economics, published jointly with Kaplan International Pathways;
- University of Northampton: Waterside Story, telling the tale of how Northampton – a town barred from having a university for 740 years – came to launch a sector-leading transformation project; and
- visiting Professor at the LSE Tim Leunig’s bold pitch for revamping undergraduate tuition fees, including shortening the repayment period from 40 to 20 years, making sure the amount owed never increases and requiring all graduates to pay back at least £10 a week, regardless of their income.
Spring
This spring was a season of reflection, with Susan Mueller, Director at Stand Alone, bidding farewell and marking the closure of a charity which supported estranged students since 2015.
And Naimat Zafary, PhD researcher at the University of Sussex, marked 1,000 days since girls’ education was banned in Afghanistan with an extraordinarily powerful piece reminding us not to take education for granted:
Last week, I visited the British Library, one of my favourite places in London. I was attracted by the Magna Carta which declared: ‘No free man shall be seized, imprisoned, dispossessed, outlawed, exiled or ruined in any way, nor in any way proceeded against, except by the lawful judgment’.
But where is lawful judgment for those denied? What fault in Afghan girls? My little nieces don’t understand their crime. Is love of education a criminal act if you happen to be female?
Summer
As we absorbed the previous day’s General Election results, attention turned to its consequences for higher education. While some of us were struggling to function on two hours’ sleep, HEPI Director Nick Hillman was already analysing how far students’ had swayed the results, building on his own analysis of the 2019 General Election and my analysis ahead of the 2024 vote.
University of Southampton Chief of Staff Giles Carden made his pitch for 10 policies the new Government could implement to fill the policy vacuum, including ‘fundamental reform’ to the Office for Students and setting out a new strategy for digital education.
And our political commentary came to a head when Rose Stephenson, Director of Policy and Advocacy, and I described what we had seen and heard at the Labour Party Conference.
Autumn
The introduction of the Renters’ Rights Bill to Parliament in September 2024 generated much discussion, including several pieces by former Unipol CEO Martin Blakey. His essential primer from October is a must-read for those trying to get their heads around the draft legislation. Martin also wrote for us in June and November on the same topic.
HEPI Director Nick Hillman asked whether restricting access to the Russell Group would improve social mobility (he was sceptical).
Also in October, outgoing Open University Vice-Chancellor Tim Blackman asked, responding to Office for Students (OfS) analysis of degree classifications, whether and how we should measure ‘grade inflation’. In the words of our Director of Partnerships, Lucy Haire, the blog:
poses challenges to the OfS’s methods and use of data, but even more than that, it gets to the heart of what learning is all about and how it is achieved. It tackles prejudice about disadvantage and weak prior learning and, above all, recognises the strides that students take, the role of good teaching and the importance of skilled teachers.
Our piece with a star-studded lineup, including former Welsh Director of Skills, Higher Education and Lifelong Learning Professor Huw Morris and Professor of Public Policy at Manchester Andy Westwood, set out a vision for a new tertiary system.
And particular credit goes to one of our highest-performing pieces of the year from Meti Basiri, CEO of ApplyBoard. He asks which international student populations institutions should be recruiting from. He also wins the (coveted) prize for best graphics.
That’s it from us
Thank you to everyone who has written for us, supported our research, kept up with our daily 6:30am blogs and engaged with us in any way over the past year.
The HEPI blog will continue in a limited form over the break, so do keep an eye out between mince pies. We will be back in full force in January.
Until then, have a wonderful festive break and we will see you for more in 2025!
Thanks to HEPI for another year of thought leadership. However, in the flood of contributions to the debate on HE funding, I think you may have mixed up two of HEPI’s papers.
You’ve listed Tim Leunig’s paper on fees (released in late September) as having been published last Winter. Interesting though Tim’s paper was (albeit, in my opinion, a bit Byzantine and misguided in parts), my guess is that you’ve conflated it with the excellent collection ‘How should undergraduate degrees be funded?’, compiled by Rose Stephenson, to which I was privileged to contribute.
This was published last April (still not Winter, but closer) and, I hope, it will have a lasting impact on the future of English HE funding given its collection of challenging ideas ranging from NUS’s arguments for the widespread abolition of fees to Jo Johnson’s inflationary fee increases as a reward for TEF and graduate outcomes to my own proposal for graduate employer contributions.
I am, of course, biased, but I thought this landmark paper demonstrated the best of what HEPI can achieve: bringing fresh thinking together with economic modelling and polling data to create a compelling set of arguments that would be hard for authors to achieve alone. For me, that was HEPI’s highlight of the year.