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

Nick Hillman

  • Setting the agenda on value for money, student well-being and workload

    7 May 2019 by Nick Hillman

    Each year, HEPI and Advance HE publish the Student Academic Experience Survey. It was originally designed to track alterations in the student experience as student finance changes. The Survey started in 2006, in the months before £3,000 fees came in, and has continued through the various financial changes since, including the…

  • What if… we really wanted to diversify access to our universities?

    29 April 2019 by Nick Hillman

    The UCL Institute of Education regularly hosts fascinating ‘What if …‘ debates about topical education issues, expertly chaired by Professor Becky Francis. I have just had the pleasure of taking part in one on access to higher education alongside Anna Vignoles, Paul Jump and Claire Fox. My speech is below,…

  • The Access Challenge in The State of Independence

    25 April 2019 by Nick Hillman

    Tonight, a new book on the state of independent education will be officially launched by Routledge. With 57 short contributions, many of the authors will be well-known to HEPI’s readers for they include a Vice Chancellor, a peer, various academics, a former special adviser to a Conservative Secretary of State for Education, think tankers, an education journalist and a former Labour Secretary of State for Education. My own chapter in the book draws comparisons between independent schools and UK universities. It is reprinted below, with kind permission of Routledge. The post-war school system in England and Wales was established by the 1944 Education Act. Section 81 of the Act that enabled Local Education Authorities…

  • The hardest (higher) education policy question of all?

    18 April 2019

    I have a niece who is studying ethics as part of one of her GCSEs. Whenever I see her, she asks me to pose difficult ethical issues for us to debate. So we chew the fat over what moral code should be built in to the design of autonomous vehicles,…

  • Three years on, we still need to build a better explanation of why EU membership is the best way to ensure UK universities are open to the rest of the world

    5 April 2019

    On Wednesday, I went off to the UCL Institute of Education for the Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE)’s excellent Conference, in particular to participate in a panel on Brexit and higher education. The instructions had asked us ‘to steer away from the political manoeuvring’, but unsurprisingly that proved impossible.…

  • Just one cohort of international students who stay in the UK to work pay £3.2 billion in tax – and they aren’t taking jobs from UK citizens

    21 March 2019

    The Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) and Kaplan International Pathways (Kaplan) are today publishing new research commissioned from London Economics on the financial contributions of international students who graduate from higher education and stay in the UK to work. The UK’s tax revenues from international students post-graduation shows the tax…