At the time of HEPI’s foundation in 2003, higher education was one of the key issues in politics and public policy. Student issues were at the centre of this. A new White Paper, The Future of Higher Education, was published by Charles Clarke, a Secretary of State who had himself once been a President of the National Union of Students (NUS). The future it envisaged was one in which students paid a larger share of the cost of higher education but would also gain more – in improved graduate earnings, greater quality of teaching and on-course experience and a stronger voice. It would also be a future in which there would be more students and they would be from more diverse backgrounds.
What students should expect from higher education, who gets to access it and what they should expect to pay, remain some of the central challenges and controversies facing us today. Yet today’s debate, about fundamentally the same issues, is radically different in its terms.
This story has coincided with personal journeys taken by us, the authors of this chapter. In 2003, we were early in our careers in the student movement, which laid the foundations for our own work in higher education policy and independent research, covering a range of topics in learning, teaching and student representation. Our reflections on how these matters have evolved cannot fail to be personal and, in the space available here, they must also be quite selective.
