Higher education

Public sector pay has been squeezed since public spending cuts began to take effect from 2011, and it looks set to be squeezed even further up to 2020. However, this comes on the back of an increase in public sector wages relative to those in the private sector during the Great Recession. There is currently significant policy interest in the extent to which continued stagnation in public sector wages will affect the ability of the public sector to recruit and retain high-quality workers, although to date little is known about the potential effects.

In this report, we present long-run series of spending per student in England across the four main stages of education (early years, schools, further education and sixth forms, and higher education).

Fifty years ago, entry to state secondary schools in England was decided on the basis of an exam taken at age 11. Those with the highest scores – around 25% of the population – could go to grammar schools (selective state funded schools), while the rest would go to secondary moderns. Children educated at these different types of school followed different curricula and took different qualifications at age 16, and staying in education beyond this point was usually only open to those who had attended grammar schools.

The UK higher education sector has expanded remarkably over the past three decades. In 1993, 13% of 25- to 29-year-olds had first degrees or higher degrees. By 2015, this had roughly tripled to 41%. Naturally, one may wonder whether the big expansion has reduced the economic returns to having a first degree. We have all heard stories about graduate unemployment and graduates employed in low-wage jobs. But what do the data show and what can we learn from history?

We study students’ motives for educational attainment in a unique survey of 885 secondary school students in the UK. As expected, students who perceive the monetary returns to education to be higher are more likely to intend to continue in full-time education. However, the main driver is the perceived consumption value, which alone explains around half of the variation of the intention to pursue higher education. Moreover, the perceived consumption value can account for a substantial part of both the socio-economic gap and the gender gap in intentions to continue in full-time education.

Since the early-1990s the UK experienced an unprecedented increase in university graduates, but at the same time the age profile of the graduate premi

This paper uses tax and student loan administrative data to measure how the earnings of English graduates around 10 years into the labour market vary with gender, institution attended, subject and socioeconomic background.

This paper examines the equilibrium effects of alternative financial aid policies intended to promote college participation. We build an overlapping generations life-cycle, heterogeneous-agent, incomplete-markets model with education, labor supply, and consumption/saving decisions.

This report uses linked individual-level administrative data from schools in England and universities in the UK to document the relationships between socio-economic status, ethnicity and HE participation, and explore what drives these relationships.

The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills launched a public consultation regarding the proposal on 22 July 2015. This short note was submitted to the consultation and extends the work of Briefing Note 174 (Britton, Crawford and Dearden, 2015), analysing the likely implications of the proposed changes for students entering university in 2016-17.

This briefing note analyses the higher education funding reforms announced by the Chancellor in the Summer Budget 2015.

This report analyses the impact of abolishing the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) in 2011. We show that this reduced Year 12 participation by around 1.5 percentage points.

This report explores the link between reading skills at age 10 and a range of outcomes later in life, including employment status, earnings and self-reported health status. It also investigates whether reading skills have greater benefits for children growing up in poor families.