Using almost 60,000 responses to the HEPI / Advance HE Student Academic Experience Survey collected between 2015 and 2019, this report considers if the UK still has a single higher education sector – from the perspective of students. Some important differences are revealed among locally-domiciled students studying in England, Scotland, Wales and…
This week’s row over universities shifting applicants from conditional to unconditional offers is a distraction from the bigger and more important picture being painted by the current Covid-19 crisis, writes Nick Hillman. There is a consensus across Government, the Office for Students and many commentators that recent offer-making behaviour by…
If you find yourself with a little more time to read over the next few weeks while social distancing or self-isolating, then – after you have read and re-read HEPI’s recent output – may I recommend The Professor and the Parson by Adam Sisman? It is a biography of Robert Peters, who spent…
Very often, people speak as if there is a trade off between further education and higher education. It is vocational versus academic. Useful versus ivory towers. Colleges versus universities. Anyone who spends more than a few seconds thinking about this swiftly realises it is largely nonsense. Higher education originally trained…
Two days before the Budget, the Higher Education Policy Institute is publishing a new report on cross-subsidies between teaching and research in universities. From T to R revisited: Cross-subsidies from teaching to research after Augar and the 2.4% R&D target by Nick Hillman (HEPI Report 127) shows: University research is underfunded…
University research is underfunded against its true costs to the tune of billions of pounds every year, and much of this gap is made up through the fees of international students. Changes or further freezes to tuition fees for home students in England would mean universities receive less money, creating…
This blog is based on my remarks to an event on academic selection that took place last week in Parliament, organised by UCL’s Centre for Education Policy and Equalising Opportunities (CEPEO) and the University of Bath’s Institute for Policy Research (IPR), which was chaired by the Labour MP Lucy Powell and Nick…
Many people do not appreciate just how huge the UK university sector now is. Together, it is worth around £100 billion a year to the country and supports nearly one million jobs. Some of the larger individual institutions have income and expenditure well in excess of £1,000,000,000 a year. Universities…
As we take stock of the Whitehall reshuffle and get to know the new Ministers responsible for the higher education sector, it seems like a good moment to think afresh about how to persuade policymakers most effectively. There is a lot of good advice on this issue available from recent…
Last night, I was honoured to be able to deliver the annual Drapers’ Lecture at Queen Mary, University of London. Among the issues covered by the lecture are: fees and funding; access; Augar; student numbers; international students; Brexit; edtech; part-time students; and research funding. Introduction Thank you for inviting me…