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The UK's only independent think tank devoted to higher education.

Nick Hillman

  • Why we need to talk about life expectancy

    6 January 2020 by Nick Hillman

    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…

  • So did students have any impact on the election?

    18 December 2019 by Nick Hillman

    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:…

  • Last-minute election musings

    12 December 2019 by Nick Hillman

    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…

  • So what exactly are the manifestos promising on higher education?

    25 November 2019 by Nick Hillman

    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…

  • Calling academics who want to write about higher education

    21 November 2019

    I am sometimes asked why HEPI doesn’t publish more policy papers by academics, given that all our output relates to higher education which, by definition, academics know about. It is a good question and one for which I probably do not have the perfect reply. (I am taking ‘academics’ here…