A Baker’s Dozen: Thirteen years of book reviews on higher education, 2013 to 2025

Fifteen years ago, in December 2010, students were rioting on the streets of London as the House of Commons voted to allow undergraduate tuition fees in England to rise to £9,000. These higher fees led to other big changes, including the removal of student number controls and the establishment of the Office for Students. While such reforms were focused on England, each had a profound knock-on impact on higher education throughout the whole UK.

So HEPI’s final report of 2025 is, appropriately, a backward-looking one that gathers together 30 book reviews on higher education written by HEPI’s Director, Nick Hillman OBE, since the higher fees began to be paid in the academic year of 2012/13.

A Baker’s Dozen: Thirteen years of book reviews on higher education, 2013 to 2025 (HEPI Debate Paper 42) includes assessments of 30 books covering higher education by academics (such as Peter Mandler and Alison Scott-Baumann), politicians (such as David Cameron and Wes Streeting), commentators (such as David Goodhart and Sam Freedman), figures from US higher education (such as Richard Corcoran and Ben Wildavsky) and even a celebrity (David Baddiel).

Nick Hillman OBE, Director of HEPI and the author of the collected pieces, said:

In HEPI’s final publication of 2025, I have taken the opportunity to bring together 30 reviews of various books tracking all those recent-ish reforms that continue to affect higher education as well as education more generally.

However, the goal is to look forward as well as to look back. Next year, we will see the continued implementation of the Post-16 Education and Skills white paper, a new Chief Executive at the Office for Students and important elections in Scotland and Wales. So as 2025 gives way to 2026, it is a good moment to remind ourselves how we got here.

I urge anyone with strong views on the changes that policymakers have wrought to higher education in recent years to set themselves a new year’s resolution to contribute to current policy debates via HEPI, or in other ways, during 2026.

The new collection of book reviews is separated into five sections covering books on:

A. Education and the state

B. Institutions and students

C. Biographies and autobiographies

D. Statecraft

E. Extremism and free speech

Reports:

Read the full report (PDF)

Notes for Editors

•  HEPI was founded in 2002 to influence the higher education debate with evidence. We are UK-wide, independent and non-partisan. We are funded by organisations and higher education institutions that wish to support vibrant policy discussions, as well as through our own events.

• Nick Hillman has been the Director of HEPI since January 2014. He was previously Special Adviser to the Rt Hon David Willetts MP (now Lord Willetts) when he was the Minister for Universities and Science. Nick is a governor of one university and two secondary schools. In June 2025, he was honoured to be awarded an OBE for ‘services to higher education’.

• The reviews in the new HEPI Debate Paper have been reproduced as they originally appeared with only minor tweaks (such as to spell out abbreviations or for the grounds of consistency). Twenty-six of the reviews first appeared on the HEPI website, while three first appeared in Times Higher Education and one first appeared on Wonkhe – HEPI thanks Times Higher Education and Wonkhe for allowing us to reproduce them.