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Blog

The HEPI Blog aims to make brief, incisive contributions to the higher education policy landscape. It is circulated to our subscribers and published online. We welcome guest submissions, which should follow our Instructions for Blog Authors. Submissions should be sent to our Blog Editor, Josh Freeman, at [email protected].

  • Exploring the changing global environment for universities

    23 November 2017 by Diana Beech

    Earlier this month, HEPI collaborated with PwC to host a roundtable dinner in Leeds on the changing global environment for universities, attended by senior leaders from across the region. The dinner was the first in a series of three HEPI/PwC roundtables which will be taking place around the country over…

  • Review of David Willetts’s ‘A University Education’ by Professor Andy Westwood

    23 November 2017 by Andy Westwood

    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…

  • Another referendum?

    21 November 2017 by Nick Hillman

    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…

  • Can we learn from boarding schools to help commuter students stick?

    20 November 2017 by Nick Hillman

    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…

  • How I got into education policymaking

    2 November 2017

    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…

  • Were student loans designed by the rich to soak the poor?

    27 October 2017 by Nick Hillman

    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…

  • HEPI response to ‘Everyone In: Insights from a diverse student population’

    16 October 2017

    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…

  • Challenges facing good governance

    13 October 2017 by David Williams

    This guest blog comes from the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education. It was first published on 12 October 2017 on the Leadership Foundation’s own blog and has been reproduced here for the HEPI readership. We, at the Leadership Foundation, are delighted to have launched our 2017-18 governance year with a joint…