Last night, HEPI – kindly supported by the UPP Foundation and Oxford University Press, as well as Warwick Business School – hosted an event to mark the launch of David Willetts’s new book, A University Education. After Lord Willetts had run through some of the key arguments in the book, Sir Michael Barber…
Yesterday, the Guardian HE Network ran an article of mine under the headline ‘University vice-chancellors, start calling for a second EU referendum’. Many interpreted this as a call for a straight re-run of the 2016 referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU. They were wrong to do so, as…
The boarding-school model of higher education In Britain, we have a ‘boarding-school model’ of higher education. Enrolling at university as a young full-time student usually means moving away from home for a full-on residential experience. Compared to other countries, this is odd. Elsewhere, people typically transfer from a local school…
HEPI is pleased to host this important contribution to the debate about the collapse in part-time higher education – and what to do about it – by the Vice-Chancellor of the UK’s largest university. Fixing the broken market in part-time study: Open University says part-time students ‘learning while earning’ need direct…
A new HEPI report How much is too much? Cross-subsidies from teaching to research in British universities (HEPI Report 100) by Vicky Olive considers the scale and sustainability of university cross-subsidies and calls on Philip Hammond to boost research and development funding in the Budget. The report finds: a research deficit…
More than a decade ago, the UK Government committed to fund the full economic cost of publicly- funded research. Initially, some progress was made. But since austerity began to bite, we have been moving backwards. Under three-quarters of the true costs of UK research are covered from funds designated for research.…
Earlier this week, I spoke to a group of students at the University of Oxford on how I ended up working in education policy. There was high demand for the session, so I am posting the remarks here in case other people seeking policymaking roles are interested in what I…
The wonderful human geographer Danny Dorling has expounded on his long-held view that our student finance system was designed by the rich to hammer the poor in a new essay for Wonkhe entitled ‘Why student loans are a confidence trick for the 85%‘. This claims student loans have been implemented…
On Monday, 16th October 2017, Unite Students are publishing a new report on the non-academic parts of the student experience entitled ‘Everyone In: Insights from a diverse student population‘. The following blog is HEPI’s response to the important findings, which also appears in the document itself. It is sometimes said higher education is the only…
This blog about the Conservative party Conference by HEPI’s Director, Nick Hillman, first appeared at the weekend on the website of Research Fortnight (at http://www.researchresearch.com/news/article/?articleId=1370475). See @HE_Analyst on Twitter for further information. The number seven has many special properties. There are seven days of the week, seven colours of the rainbow, seven notes in a musical scale, seven ages of…