The National Audit Office have today published the Investigation into financial support for students at alternative higher education providers. It is interesting and timely.* It includes challenges for BIS, HE regulators and alternative providers. And it contains some useful new evidence, including examples of the adverts used to entice people on to courses.…
HEPI published a detailed study on the electoral power of full-time students, Do students swing elections? Registration, turnout and voting behaviour among full-time students, on the morning of 1st December 2014 – the deadline for the first electoral roll under Individual Electoral Registration. Based on new analysis by Professor Stephen…
It is often said that students are a particularly powerful group of voters. The authors of Do students swing elections? Registration, turnout and voting among full-time students? set out to test this assertion, which turns out to be half true. A number of factors must be present for the student voice to…
Below is the full text of the 2014 Hepi Annual Lecture by Professor Paul Wellings, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Wollongong, which was delivered at Australia House on the evening of Wednesday, 26th November 2014. A full version of the lecture with some supporting slides is available in pdf format here. Ladies and Gentleman, It…
In this guest blog, Ruth Thompson, co-chair of the Higher Education Commission’s recent inquiry into financial sustainability (and a member of the Hepi Advisory Board), discusses the group’s recent work. On 24 November the Higher Education Commission launched the report of its latest inquiry, into the financial sustainability of English HE.…
On the morning of 26th November, HEPI co-hosted a roundtable meeting at the House of Commons, chaired by the Rt Hon. David Willetts MP, the former Minister for Universities and Science, on alternative providers. The event was co-hosted with CentreForum, the liberal think tank, to discuss their new report Access and equity: positioning alternative providers…
Ten days ago, the Government’s response to the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee’s report on Student Loans was published. It received some press coverage at the time, for example from Times Higher Education, the BBC and the Guardian. They all rightly focussed on the Government’s refusal to accept Recommendation 11, which called ‘for an urgent…
The Director of Hepi, Nick Hillman, discusses some of the issues around postgraduate funding that are under discussion in the Treasury. As the UK’s only specialist think tank on higher education, Hepi keeps a close eye on the higher education work undertaken by the generalist think tanks of the left…
On Tuesday, 4th November 2014, the Director of HEPI, Nick Hillman, took part in a panel discussion at the Nuffield Foundation on recent higher education research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. An extract from his remarks is below. Thank you for inviting me. I head up the Higher Education…
In this blog post, the Director of HEPI, Nick Hillman, takes a first look at some new proposals on student funding from the Institute of Economic Affairs. On 23rd October, the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) published Universities Challenged: Funding Higher Education through a Free-Market ‘Graduate Tax’ by Peter Ainsworth. It’s good to…