As part of this year’s Festival of Social Science, IFS delivered a public economic talk on "The economics of higher education" aimed at final year undergraduates studying economics.
We have constructed a new student finance calculator, based on our detailed analysis of graduate earnings and the student finance system, which allows users to look at the effects of changing any parameter of the system.
"Please government, stop putting good, professional, public servants in an almost impossible situation by forcing them to choose between two incompatible versions of doing the right thing." Paul Johnson in The Times.
The proportion of UK people with university degrees tripled between 1993 and 2015. However, over the same period the time trend in the college wage premium has been extraordinarily flat. We show that these patterns cannot be explained by composition changes.
Recent IFS work shows that students from disadvantaged backgrounds see some of the largest financial benefits from going on to university. But these students are also less likely to attend university than their better-off peers who get exactly the same grades as them. And, even among students with the same grades attending the same HE programme, those from disadvantaged backgrounds still on average go on to earn less.
The Social Mobility Commission investigated the drivers of socio-economic differences in post-16 course choices and their likely social mobility consequences.
We investigate differences in the returns to undergraduate degrees by socio-economic background and ethnicity using the Department for Education’s Longitudinal Education Outcomes (LEO) data set.
MPs will debate a number of petitions today relating to university tuition fees. These petitions are asking for all or part of tuition fees for the 2019/20 or 2020/21 academic year to be reimbursed. Between them, they have gathered nearly a million signatures.
The share of people staying on in education beyond the age of 18 has grown substantially in the UK since the 1980s. Yet until now, evidence on the effect of these qualifications on subsequent earnings has been limited. This event presented key findings from three pieces of research published in 2020 by the IFS on returns to education.
Further and higher education providers face severe resource challenges as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. At this event, IFS researchers and panellists Philip Augar and Mary Curnock Cook analysed these challenges.
In our annual series of reports on education spending, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, we bring together data on education spending per student across the life cycle and provide analysis about the major issues facing different sectors.
This report provides estimates of the earnings returns to completing postgraduate degrees, for British and Northern Irish students studying in Britain.
