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].
The cross-party Business, Innovation and Skills Select Committee has today published a report on Student Loans. It is the output of an enquiry which HEPI’s former Director, Bahram Bekhradnia gave oral evidence to last year. It is as useful and thorough as you would expect. The key points are: acceptance of the official figure…
HEPI exists thanks to the support of individual higher education providers, including a majority of UK universities, and other organisations with an interest in higher education. This generous support means every HEPI pamphlet is produced in hard copies for wide circulation and is also freely available to anyone around the world in electronic…
So my boss for 10 years, David Willetts, has finally left the Government. By the end of his tenure, he was the only person to have attended shadow cabinet and cabinet continuously for over 15 years – since William Hague made him shadow Secretary of State for Education in 1998.…
As I travel around the country visiting higher education institutions (HEIs), I am asked surprisingly often what UKIP’s policies on higher education are. There is particular interest in the question within HEIs that sit in areas where the party has a strong local presence. I’m not complaining: it is a…
Introduction Thank you for inviting me. HEPI is the UK’s only specialist think-tank on higher education: we are independent, non-partisan and a registered charity. Our goal is to shape the higher education debate for the better, with research. Or, to put it another way, using evidence to help politicians resist…
Sir Andrew Green, who heads up MigrationWatch (‘an independent, voluntary, non political body which is concerned about the present scale of immigration’), has poured cold water over the recent HEPI survey of Conservative election candidates on international students. In particular, he complains it was small. It was indeed, but then…
Back in April, HEPI produced two publications comparing the English and Australian student loan systems. Today, we were lucky enough to host a seminar with Professor Bruce Chapman (often described as the architect of the Australian loans system), jointly with the University Alliance and Royal Holloway. One issue that came up is…
New research published by the Department for Education has recommended that universities operating contextualised admissions should treat selective and non-selective state schools differently. It is an important contribution to the debate on school type versus school performance. Earlier this year, some people wondered if the battle was over when HEFCE said…
Higher education policy doesn’t stop at the weekend in think-tank land, at least not when there’s less than a year to a general election. So Policy Exchange hosted an event today looking ahead to the educational policies that might be presented to the electorate in 2015 – see #PXed2015…
This new Debate section of the HEPI website was established partly to bolster HEPI’s evidence base by giving people an opportunity to submit their ideas and partly to provide a new forum to debate topical higher education issues. One question we would love your thoughts on is why are PhDs so rarely publishable in…