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, Rose Stephenson, at [email protected].
It is said that replacing maintenance grants with bigger loans could lead to fewer undergraduates. That may prove a rash assumption. Against consensus opinion, the tripling of tuition fee loans to £3,000 in 2006 and again to £9,000 in 2012 made little difference to the behaviour of young full-time applicants.…
Today’s Productivity paper from HM Treasury provides yet more evidence, if any were needed, that the Conservative-majority Government is doing things differently to the Conservative-led Coalition. The 2010 to 2015 Government made one early decision that transformed the finances of some alternative higher education providers (known as APs) when allowing their…
On the morning of 2nd July, 2015, the Leadership Foundation held an event to launch a personal perspective on international students by Leszek Borysiewicz, the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University. The Director of HEPI made the following remarks at the event. Thank you very much for inviting me to speak. It is a…
As regular readers of this website know, HEPI is the UK’s only specialist think tank on higher education. We have a lively programme of events and publications, which are masterminded from our office in north Oxford. We have a small central team and are now looking to recruit a new…
This blog entry is the remarks made by, Nick Hillman, the Director of the Higher Education Policy Institute at the press briefing on the results of the 2015 HEPI / HEA Academic Experience Survey of 15,000 full-time undergraduates (Full report and Summary report) Good morning. Thank you for coming to this press…
This is the third in a series of pieces by HEPI visiting researcher Nicholas Robinson comparing the UK and Australian higher education systems. The first two on maintenance support and part-time students can be found here and here. The dust has finally settled on the debate over the tuition fee…
This piece by Nicholas Robinson, a researcher at HEPI who grew up and went to university in Australia, is the second in a series comparing the UK and Australian higher education systems. The first covered student maintenance and was published in Times Higher Education on May 7 2015. The number…
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…