It has been described as “the year of elections”. During 2024, countries that are home to around half of the world’s population will go to the polls, including eight of the 10 most populous nations. In total, around four billion people will have the opportunity to take part in regional, general and presidential elections.
But what role will higher education play in contenders’ campaigns and voters’ decisions? And how will education and research be reshaped by the results? Here, Times Higher Education journalists take the political temperature in key sectors around the globe.
If the polls giving Labour big leads are to be believed, the UK’s general election will eject from power a Conservative Party often hostile to universities on cultural and economic grounds after its shift towards non-graduate voters in the wake of the Brexit vote.
The Westminster government controls education policy in England, where the tuition fee cap has been frozen at £9,250 since 2017, leading to real-terms falls in the unit of resource for teaching home students. The Conservative government has offered no prospect of change despite increasingly loud warnings of a brewing crisis in English university funding.
