Higher education

This Election Briefing Note provides a summary of the current higher education funding system in England and investigates the two big reform packages that are currently on the table going into the 2019 General Election.

Postgraduate degree holders experience lower cyclical wage variation than those with undergraduate degrees.

To understand and design student loan systems, realistic earnings and/or income projections for current and future graduates are crucial. In this paper, Current Population Survey (CPS) data from the US is used to demonstrate empirical approaches that can be exploited to simulate lifetime income and earnings profiles for graduates which are needed to understand and design effective and sustainable student loan systems.

Using a political-frame-free, lab-in-the-field experiment, we investigate the associations between employment status, self-reported political ideology, and preferences for redistribution. The experiment consists of a real-effort task, followed by a four-player dictator game.

This work estimates how government spending is distributed by subject studied and university attended, based on grants and unrepaid student loans (including both tuition and maintenance loans).

Graduates from higher income families (with median income of around £77,000) have average earnings which are 20% higher than those from lower income families (with median income of around £26,000). Once we condition on institution and subject choices, this premium roughly halves, to around 10%.

This report estimates the impact on earnings of attending HE compared with not going. The authors detail how this varies by subject and institution of study, as well as how these returns vary by gender, prior educational attainment and the sorts of subjects individuals have studied up to age 18. The report makes use of the Longitudinal Education Outcomes (LEO) dataset, which links together tax, benefit, higher education and school records to provide a rich description of individuals’ trajectories through the education system and into the labour market.