In just over 50 years the proportion of students studying for sub-bachelor qualifications – such as Higher National Diplomas and Certificates – has declined from around half at the time of the Robbins inquiry to some 15 per cent now. More...
We, at the Leadership Foundation, are delighted to have launched our 2017-18 governance year with a joint event with HEPI, the leading policy institute of higher education in the UK. In this blog post we provide a summary of the debate on the challenges facing good governance that took place last month, which included contributions from governors and governance specialists from within and outside of higher education. More...
It is sometimes said higher education is the only part of our education system where prior disadvantage is wiped out. This is because the most advantaged students sometimes perform less well academically than other students between enrolment and graduation. More...
Fresh from what is becoming my annual sojourn to the political party conferences (a hat trick of Lib Dem, Labour and Conservative this year), I offer a few reflections on the mood of the political community. More...
The wonderful human geographer Danny Dorling has expounded on his long-held view that our student finance system was designed by the rich to hammer the poor in a new essay for Wonkhe entitled ‘Why student loans are a confidence trick for the 85%‘. This claims student loans have been implemented by ‘con artists’ to ‘defraud’ disadvantaged people. More...
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 increased to 6.1%. More...
For decades, successive governments have struggled to create the economic conditions that would allow the UK to close its chronic productivity gap. More...
One of the Government’s stated aims in the current round of higher education reforms is to ‘make it easier to set up high-quality new universities to give students more choice’. For the most part, the focus of policy – and debate – has been on potential new entrants to the higher education sector. More...
University changed my life, just as it will change the lives of those school leavers who enrol for the first time this autumn. More...
Amidst the countless graduates taking the first steps towards launching their careers, more and more have moved away from seeking employment in favour of establishing small businesses of their own. This new wave of entrepreneurial ambition has likely been triggered by a combination of factors, from the economic downturn, to the growth of ecommerce and ‘digital nomadism’. More...
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