Publications

There has never been a more important moment to ask students in UK higher education institutions what they think about their own lives. The 2019/20 academic year has been characterised by industrial action, a major global health crisis and rapid adverse changes to the graduate labour market. The Covid-19 pandemic…

Looking at how the UK postgraduate landscape has changed since the previous report was published a decade ago, this new report uses previously unpublished data to reveal the state of UK postgraduate education in the years before the Covid-19 crisis struck. The analysis considers how postgraduate education was affected by…

Summary Analysis of 17 universities reveals a continued rise in staff access to counselling and occupational health referrals since Pressure Vessels was published in 2019. From 2016 to 2018, there was an increase of 16% in counselling at the 14 universities for which comparable time series data were obtained. Over the same…

Over three-quarters (79%) of graduates feel confident of getting a graduate level job once they graduate. However, when asked about their feelings towards entering the labour market, more (28%) cite anxiety as their number one feeling, ahead of confidence (23%), uncertainty (16%) and feeling overwhelmed by the prospect (16%). Only…

Using almost 60,000 responses to the HEPI / Advance HE Student Academic Experience Survey collected between 2015 and 2019, this report considers if the UK still has a single higher education sector – from the perspective of students. Some important differences are revealed among locally-domiciled students studying in England, Scotland, Wales and…

In 2012, Australia removed student number controls or, in the local terminology, introduced a ‘demand driven system’ based on student choice. In 2015, England followed suit. In both places, entry to higher education was opened up but non-completion rates rose. In Australia, the demand driven system ended in 2017, despite…

University research is underfunded against its true costs to the tune of billions of pounds every year, and much of this gap is made up through the fees of international students. Changes or further freezes to tuition fees for home students in England would mean universities receive less money, creating…

In recent years there has been an increased focus on students’ transitions out of university and into the workplace. Policy changes have included the development of the Teaching Excellence Framework, the new Graduate Outcomes survey and the tracking of graduate salaries through the Longitudinal Educational Outcomes dataset. This report examines…

The General Election of December 2019 ended the political gridlock of the previous three years. The question of whether we remained in or left the European Union was definitively settled, and not in the way universities had hoped. In this report, the authors call for fundamental change. Now, they argue,…