Nick Hillman

Over the Christmas and new year period, there were more stories about building a UK ARPA, based on the US DARPA, which stands for Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency. Whether or not this is a good idea as a way of distributing research funding, and it may well be, has…

A little controversy At HEPI, we never set out to be controversial. But sometimes, inadvertently, we are. And never more so in the last year than with Iain Mansfield’s paper on grammar schools. When it came out, exactly a year ago on 10 January 2019, we were told the numbers…

There are probably lots of issues related to higher education policymaking that we don’t talk enough about. But, for me, the prime one is life expectancy. It links to almost everything. Yet, aside from the consequences for staff pensions, we seemingly never talk about it. Even on pensions, we talk…

Many people thought students could boost the election results for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. Over time, as the proper academic studies of the election drip out, we will come to know for certain if that happened or not. In the meantime, we have undertaken a quick-and-dirty exercise to test the proposition:…

This has been an odd election. Many of the original expectations about it – such as the idea that the vote would be almost solely about Brexit or that the parties would eschew the leader-centric campaigning that didn’t work for Theresa May or that smaller parties would benefit from greater…

The august Office for Budget Responsibility is crucial to economic forecasting and limiting economic shocks by providing independent oversight of economic decisions. The importance of its role in policy in modern Britain is hard to exaggerate. One of the inputs into its modelling on the economy is student numbers. The…

In a new initiative this year, HEPI is publishing an Annual Review. This is an edited version of a private report prepared each year for our Trustees and has not been published before. The short (four-page) report recaps our work from August 2018 to July 2019, covering: 25 pieces of…

Few people bother to read entire election manifestos. Indeed, even some candidates standing for election do not read their own party’s manifesto from cover to cover. But even though manifestos are a very far-from-perfect guide as to what will happen in the years ahead, they are important because they are…