What if being world-class is bad for universities? By playing the status game, UK higher education has forfeited public trust and our right to growth. What other sector would stall in an era of surging demand, as our addressable market expands from young people to all adults? We need new…
It’s taken me almost 20 years but, over the summer, I eventually got around to reading a book I’ve been wanting to read on higher education policy since I started working in the area over 15 years ago: University to Uni – The Politics of Higher Education since 1944 by Robert Stevens.…
A 25-year journey It is decades since I last read quite so many words by Sam Freedman. But over 25 years ago, I had the privilege of being his GCSE History teacher. In recent years, Sam has made his name as a political commentator and he has now written his…
This speech looking back at the last 14 years of higher education policy and forward to what might come next was delivered yesterday by HEPI Director, Nick Hillman, to staff at the Open University. Introduction It is great to be back here at the Open University (OU). As I live…
Since the general election was called, HEPI has been arguing that parliamentary constituencies with a large number of undergraduates could behave unexpectedly. This rests on the idea that the timing of the election in early July meant many (not all) students would have moved back home for the holidays. Furthermore, we argued this…
Critics of the way that England funds higher education often assume we have copied the United States. At a surface level, this may seem true: after all, both countries have funding systems that are based on large student loans and both the US and the UK do very well in…
Data for all 650 new constituencies can be downloaded here: Nick Hillman, Director of HEPI, said: ‘Surprisingly little information about our country is available at a constituency level. This limits the quality of political debate because a general election is actually 650 smaller battles – one in every constituency. ‘So…
The Student Academic Experience Survey comes of age Back at base, we tend to think of the HEPI / Advance HE Student Academic Experience Survey (or SAES) as a flagship piece of output. Produced annually and originally the brainchild of HEPI’s President and founder, Bahram Bekhradnia, it is now in its eighteenth…
Regulation in England In England, the main regulator of higher education institutions became the Office for Students in 2018. From 2012 onwards, the majority of teaching income for home students had shifted from grant funding from the old Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and towards higher tuition fee…
The ‘fastest ever increase in domestic public R&D spending’? At the 2019 General Election, the Conservative Party reiterated the commitments already made by the Conservative Government to spend more on research and development (R&D). Their manifesto promised ‘the fastest ever increase in domestic public R&D spending, including in basic science research to…