In a new HEPI pamphlet, The accounting and budgeting of student loans, Andrew McGettigan reveals how the treatment of student loans in the national and departmental accounts is driving policy. The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) has been wrestling with the multi-billion pound impact of student loans. It…
Understanding of how student loans appear in the national and departmental accounts is poor. Yet the issue is crucial to the future of student finance, to any sale of the student loan book and even to the size of the UK’s debt. This paper seeks to explain the accounting and…
Below is a short extract from a speech that Nick Hillman, HEPI Director, made earlier today to a Higher Education Academy meeting of Pro-Vice Chancellors for teaching and learning. No political party promised to protect the budget of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) in the lengthy general…
As intended, the recent publication of Open Access: Is a National Licence the answer?, a HEPI Occasional Paper written by Sarah Chaytor and me, stimulated press coverage (e.g. THE) and comment (e.g. Curry, Kernohan, Hillman, Taylor, Tickell and Jubb). At the time I commented that “a national licence for [Open…
The clearest higher education policy of this election campaign is Labour’s commitment to reduce the full-time undergraduate tuition fee cap from £9,000 to £6,000 and to raise the maximum maintenance grant by £400 a year alongside. It is a clear pitch to students (and their parents). Polling among students suggests it…
It seems the predictions that higher education will not play a major part in the 2015 general election campaign (made by HEPI and others) are coming true. New research by Loughborough University shows higher education has so far made up just 0.3 per cent of general election policy discussions. This…
On 1 April 2015, the HEPI Director, Nick Hillman, delivered a speech to the Association of University Administrators’ Annual Conference (AUA) in Nottingham on ‘Higher education and the general election’. This is the opening section of the speech (though the first section was abridged somewhat on delivery). Introduction Thank you for inviting…
We are privileged to have some civil servants who spend years on the same policy area, drilling down into the detail so that they know it like no other. Dodging the civil service’s tendency to churn people around in the hope they’ll become a ‘generalist’, these people become true experts…
On Tuesday, 31st March, the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) will launch a new report, Open Access: Is a National Licence the answer?, at a research conference held at the Royal Society. The paper calls for everyone in the UK to be given access to the latest academic research free…
Academic research is, rightly, becoming easier to access. The potential benefits from giving companies, NHS staff, teachers, independent researchers and policymakers access to the latest research are enormous. But the change brings big challenges too, especially for the UK’s world-leading publishing industry. At the moment, the UK’s support for ‘gold…