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…
Former Vice-Chancellor, Professor Sir Chris Husbands responds to the financial and policy challenges facing the English higher education by sketching out four different plausible futures: Scenario 1: The evolution of the present Scenario 2: Delivering the 2010 vision Scenario 3: A place-based tertiary system Scenario 4: A differentiated system All…
There is a common view that students are a particularly influential group of voters. There are lots of them and they tend to be concentrated in certain parliamentary constituencies – plus it is known that people with higher levels of education tend to be more likely to vote than those…
We have – finally – today achieved something I have long wanted HEPI to do: we have taken a blank sheet of paper and worked out how much money students need to live on. By ‘need to live’ we don’t mean just avoiding poverty; nor do we mean living in…