HEPI has today published a new report on illegal drug use among students. Nick Hillman, HEPI’s Director: Four years ago, back in 2018, HEPI collaborated with YouthSight and the University of Buckingham on a small but representative poll of students on their drug use. We found: The results were very…
In this HEPI Debate Paper, Arda Ozcubukcu and Professor Graham Towl explore how higher education institutions might approach illicit drug use within their student populations, suggesting that a zero-tolerance approach may cause more harm than it prevents as those who need help do not come forward for fear of punishment.…
HEPI Director Nick Hillman tries to make sense of what we already know about today’s higher education announcements. 1. An increase in the student loan repayment term to 40 years: The increase from 30 to 40 years will mean the average former student will in future repay for longer and that…
As new legislation on free speech and academic freedom continues its passage through Parliament, HEPI Director Nick Hillman takes a look at one recently published book on the issue. Andrew Doyle has studied at three British universities but he became famous under the pseudonym Titania McGrath, who sends out a…
This post by HEPI Director Nick Hillman: considers the arguments for and against the use of big data in higher education; looks at the reasons behind the growing use of metrics; and ends with a discussion on the increasing demands to contexualise metrics before using them for important decisions. The…
This month, February 2022, marks four years since the Augar panel was set up to review post-18 education in England. They reported in May 2019, by which time it felt like we had been waiting ages and longer than anyone had originally expected. But when compared to the Government’s dilatory…
HEPI is hosting a private dinner on academic freedom and free speech, which we hope will result in future HEPI written output on the topic. By invitation only.
The flurry of important new documents from the Office for Students will be pored over for months, particularly between now and the end of the consultation period in March 2022. Most notably, the OfS wants to assess institutions on their students’ continuation, completion and progression rates. Institutions that fall below certain thresholds…
No one would dispute that COVID-19 has severely disrupted the education of millions of people. Our polling with Advance HE, for example, shows an unprecedented proportion of undergraduate students think they have received ‘poor’ or ‘very poor’ value for money and twice as many as usual feel their experiences have been…
Here, on the last day of a year that many people will be pleased to see the back of, is our Top 40 most popular HEPI website pages of 2021. (The list is restricted to blogs and news stories so excludes, for example, our ever-changing home page.) I am struck…