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…
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…
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…
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…
This is the third in a series of three HEPI blogs this week on value. The other two are available here and here. It is often said that higher education has big benefits for individuals and for society, so it should be financed by taxpayers sufficient to cover the public benefits.…
Today brought the very sad news that Richard Garner has died. He was once the UK’s longest serving education correspondent, having worked on the Birmingham Evening Mail, the Times Educational Supplement, the Mirror and the Independent between 1980 and 2016 and, afterwards, he continued to write a column for the Times Educational Supplement. His book, The Thirty…
Every year, HEPI starts our annual programme of events with three parliamentary breakfast seminars, co-hosted with our Partner organisation Advance HE and kindly sponsored for many years by the long-standing Labour MP Barry Sheerman. This year’s series kicks off next week, on Thursday 30 January, when we will consider ‘The geo-politics…