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

Nick Hillman

  • Remembering Richard Garner

    28 January 2020 by Nick Hillman

    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…

  • 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…