Many people do not appreciate just how huge the UK university sector now is. Together, it is worth around £100 billion a year to the country and supports nearly one million jobs. Some of the larger individual institutions have income and expenditure well in excess of £1,000,000,000 a year. Universities…
As we take stock of the Whitehall reshuffle and get to know the new Ministers responsible for the higher education sector, it seems like a good moment to think afresh about how to persuade policymakers most effectively. There is a lot of good advice on this issue available from recent…
Last night, I was honoured to be able to deliver the annual Drapers’ Lecture at Queen Mary, University of London. Among the issues covered by the lecture are: fees and funding; access; Augar; student numbers; international students; Brexit; edtech; part-time students; and research funding. Introduction Thank you for inviting me…
This is the third in a series of three HEPI blogs this week on value. The other two are available here and here. It is often said that higher education has big benefits for individuals and for society, so it should be financed by taxpayers sufficient to cover the public benefits.…
Today brought the very sad news that Richard Garner has died. He was once the UK’s longest serving education correspondent, having worked on the Birmingham Evening Mail, the Times Educational Supplement, the Mirror and the Independent between 1980 and 2016 and, afterwards, he continued to write a column for the Times Educational Supplement. His book, The Thirty…
Every year, HEPI starts our annual programme of events with three parliamentary breakfast seminars, co-hosted with our Partner organisation Advance HE and kindly sponsored for many years by the long-standing Labour MP Barry Sheerman. This year’s series kicks off next week, on Thursday 30 January, when we will consider ‘The geo-politics…
Over the Christmas and new year period, there were more stories about building a UK ARPA, based on the US DARPA, which stands for Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency. Whether or not this is a good idea as a way of distributing research funding, and it may well be, has…
A little controversy At HEPI, we never set out to be controversial. But sometimes, inadvertently, we are. And never more so in the last year than with Iain Mansfield’s paper on grammar schools. When it came out, exactly a year ago on 10 January 2019, we were told the numbers…
There are probably lots of issues related to higher education policymaking that we don’t talk enough about. But, for me, the prime one is life expectancy. It links to almost everything. Yet, aside from the consequences for staff pensions, we seemingly never talk about it. Even on pensions, we talk…
Many people thought students could boost the election results for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. Over time, as the proper academic studies of the election drip out, we will come to know for certain if that happened or not. In the meantime, we have undertaken a quick-and-dirty exercise to test the proposition:…