Sixteen months ago today, on 30 May 2019, the long-awaited Augar report came out. Written by Philip Augar and a team of experts, it included 53 recommendations covering FE, HE and student funding. At the time, HEPI responded positively to the package of proposals, which were serious, coherent and wide-ranging. They were not perfect,…
I am one of that small group of people who is genuinely sad that the autumn political party conferences are (necessarily) not happening in person this year. They are eccentric affairs, but genuinely good fun and interesting for anyone with a passion for policymaking. They are also useful occasions for…
The Higher Education Policy Institute is a charity established in 2002 ‘to promote research into and understanding of all aspects of higher education and to disseminate the useful results of such research for the education of policy makers and the general public in the United Kingdom’. HEPI is funded by…
HEPI was established in 2002 ‘to promote research into and understanding of all aspects of higher education and to disseminate the useful results of such research for the education of policy makers and the general public in the United Kingdom’. As we approach our 18th birthday (in November 2020), we…
One of the few academic books I purchased rather than borrowed, as a History undergraduate 30 years ago was Peter Mandler’s Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform: Whigs and Liberals 1830-1852 (1990). Sadly, I don’t remember much about the contents but I do still recall vividly how I felt when I…
The Higher Education Policy Institute has published a new report on student voters at the last four UK general elections (2010, 2015, 2017 and 2019). Student voters: Did they make a difference? (HEPI Report 133) by Nick Hillman focuses on the results in the 25 parliamentary constituencies in England, Scotland and…
This short report looks more deeply into the question of whether student voters make a difference to UK election results by: taking the 25 constituencies with the highest proportion of full-time students – those where they are thought to make up more than 17.5 per cent of the electorate; considering…
The number of serving world leaders educated in another country is widely regarded as a proxy for ‘soft power’. When a country has educated a relatively high number of people who go on to lead their own countries, this is thought to reflect the influence of the host country and…
The Higher Education Policy Institute has published the HEPI Annual Soft-Power Ranking 2020, which looks at the countries that have educated the most serving world leaders. The results show the UK, which had educated the most world leaders in 2017 but slipped relative to the US in both 2018 and…
How many people attend higher education has been a lively political issue for decades – the topic of many official white papers and green papers, ministerial and prime ministerial speeches as well as HEPI publications. In general, politicians in power have tended to support expansion – for example: in the…