Last week, we featured six questions that need to be addressed by those joining the chorus calling for lower tuition fees for STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) students in England. Differential fees by discipline would be novel for the UK, but (as we explained in a 2014 pamphlet) they have existed for a long…
A new rumour has been sucked into the vacuum where Labour’s student fees policy will eventually be – a lower fee cap (£6k) for STEM undergraduates. Isabel Hardman is an excellent journalist, but I stress I’ve no idea if the party really is seriously considering the policy. UKIP claim the idea…
HEPI generally only publishes exclusive content, but there has been relatively little discussion in the UK of Obama’s new proposals for free two-year community college places. So we have decided as a one-off to reprint this recent article by Donald E. Heller, Dean of the College of Education at Michigan State University. It previously appeared on The…
On 27th November, Professor Paul Wellings, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Wollongong in New South Wales, Australia, delivered the 11th Annual Lecture. Professor Wellings’s title was ‘The Architecture and the Plumbing: What features do the Higher Education systems in the UK and Australia have in common?’ We are today publishing the full text which, for the…
This blog post argues: the REF process has been run smoothly and complaints about the principle of research evaluation do not typically extend to the way the process has been run; the improvements in the UK’s research performance in REF2014 are not surprising but could lead to greater concentration of funding,…
The Public Accounts Committee hearing this afternoon on alternative providers of higher education was a bruising affair. Margaret Hodge was in the Chair and she and her cross-party members ferociously grilled the witnesses from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, the Student Loans Company, the Higher Education Funding Council…
We are grateful to Rob Behrens, the Independent Adjudicator for higher education, for contributing this exclusive guest blog on the new good practice framework for handling complaints and appeals – which is to be published at 9am on 12th December 2014. There has been an overwhelmingly positive reaction to the news…
There are strong rumours that the Chancellor will announce a new system of postgraduate loans in his autumn statement today. This would tackle some access problems by making finance less of a barrier. It’s not clear if George Osborne will announce a fully worked-out scheme or (probably more likely) promise to consult on the details.…
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.…
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.…