According to a new pamphlet issued by the Social Market Foundation, “the Tories’ student loan system that finances our universities, voted through by the Lib Dems, is a timebomb waiting to go off”. The…
The funding of higher education is a mess, and it is getting messier. New proposals on the table to allow universities to take on the debt burden of their own students could have profoundly worrying consequences…
“There is no conflict between fair access and academic excellence. Nor should there be.” So said Les Ebdon, director of fair access to higher education in his latest report to parliament. But when it comes…
It’s come as a surprise to many in higher education: students are increasingly satisfied with their experience of English university. A new report published by the Higher Education Funding Council for…
Students should be given a lifetime loan allocation that they can use for different undergraduate and postgraduate courses, according to new proposals put forward by a group of universities. The University…
In contemporary Australia, post-school education is necessary for most well-paid jobs. And so who gets access to education is important. University of Melbourne Vice-Chancellor Glyn Davis echoed many people’s…
The recent University Alliance report on quality in higher education brings into sharp focus one of the major issues facing contemporary UK higher education: how we ensure that the sector maintains its…
Imbalances in the share of growth across the regions continue to be deep-rooted, the Office of National Statistics has confirmed. By 2012, the South East was the only region that had only just crept ahead…
Education minister Christopher Pyne has released new public subsidy rates for domestic students in degrees offered by universities, to take effect from 2016. As a budget saving the government aims to lower…
The raising of the cap on tuition fees charged by universities in England to £9,000 per year in 2012 does not currently look like it will save the government much money – but it has led to a substantial…
Spring in UK universities sees the funding letter drop on the mat of the vice chancellor’s lodge and like an English April, no two years are the same. Coalition ministers are keen to tell us that the present…
Nearly three-quarters of graduates will not clear their student loans before the end of the repayment period. This means the large majority of those who go to university aged 18 or 19 will still be paying…
I’m an unabashed political junkie. Who’s up, who’s down; who’s in, who’s out. Yet it’s fair to say that pretty much all the day-to-day policy spinning, posturing and firefighting rarely percolates outside…
There are class tensions existing very close to the surface of the government’s policy to increase the number of students from disadvantaged areas going to university. New data shows that the number of…
It was clear that recent fundamental changes to the way we pay for university in England would have longstanding ramifications for young people’s plans for their future. Two years into the new fee regime…
Senior Research Fellow in Youth, Research & Policy Centre, Brotherhood of St Laurence, Honorary Fellow in Education Policy, Melbourne Graduate School of Education, The University of Melbourne