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, Josh Freeman, at [email protected].
The main currency of politics is killer facts: striking points that move a debate on. In higher education, current killer facts include the claim from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) that the poorest graduates in England leave university with debts of £57,000 and that interest on student loans has…
On 21 July, HEPI published a guest blog by Alison Baverstock detailing Kingston University’s Big Read initiative. Earlier this summer, Alison kindly gave me a copy of Kit de Waal’s My Name is Leon – the book being sent out to all Kingston freshers starting university this term. Having just had…
The All-Party Parliamentary Group on Students held a lively discussion in the House of Commons earlier this week on the topical issue of the ‘student voice’. We are reproducing here, with permission, the helpful note produced to stimulate the conversation. The All-Party Group, is chaired by Paul Blomfield MP (who…
Recently, someone asked me which HEPI reports had been most widely read. There is no perfect way to measure this because we send out the same number of hard copies of each report and it is up to the recipients to decide whether to read them or not. It is…
Last week, the Universities UK Annual Conference at Brunel University was all over the newspapers, particularly in relation to the important speech by Jo Johnson, the Minister for Universities. But somewhere on the wall in the Gents’ loo in Brunel’s students’ union building was a message that could be more…
The new academic year is almost upon us. The legislation is now on the statute books, the TEF has been rolled out and we have a tiny bit more clarity on the status of international students, with a Government review currently underway. There remains, however, a rich agenda still to…
The summer showed that vice-chancellors’ pay is a matter of public interest. Counter-intuitively, and in contrast to almost every other issue affecting universities, the best way to address the concerns might be for institutions to become a little more inward-looking. In other words, or so I have argued elsewhere (‘On v-c…
This guest blog comes from Victoria Greene, Marketing Consultant and Freelance Writer. Victoria works with ecommerce businesses and entrepreneurs to create effective content and marketing strategies. She is currently mentoring entrepreneurial students in Chicago. The first steps on the road to post-graduate employment can be a challenge, and finding work that makes…
University changed my life, just as it will change the lives of those school leavers who enrol for the first time this autumn. But I didn’t particularly enjoy my first term or my first year. I was in one of the oldest and most traditional halls of residence, but my…
On 14 August 2017, the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) and the social mobility charity Brightside jointly published a collection of essays by senior higher education figures entitled ‘Where next for widening participation and fair access? New insights from leading thinkers’. Since 15 August, we have been showcasing the contents of this…