2,607 pieces
Newest first, since August 2013 · page 8 of 131
· Comment
The international student boom is over – and the bust is being delivered by stealth
With refusal rates spiking, withdrawals surging, and universities pre-emptively retreating from high-risk markets, Jim Dickinson finds an international contraction engineered through plumbing rather than policy
· Policy Watch
Students lose procedural rights in the OIA’s drive for simplicity
The OIA is consulting on a shorter, more flexible complaints scheme – but Jim Dickinson finds that most of the flexibility created depends on the adjudicator’s benevolence
· Comment
Euro visions: Bangaranker
On the final day of Eurovision week, Jim Dickinson celebrates Bulgaria’s historic win with a look at its higher education map
· Comment
Euro visions: Technology made beneficial to society
On Day Five of Eurovision week, Jim Dickinson has a mooch around Austrian HE to work out what it’s built on – and what staff and students do on top
· SUs · Members
Moldova is on duty
With Mack Marshall
· Wonk Corner
Are financial sustainability and student protection compatible?
There are various frustrating aspects of this week’s Commons’ Education Committee report on “Higher Education and Funding: Threat of Insolvency and International Students”.
· Comment
Euro visions: Saluti a tutti, Moldova is on duty
For Day Four of Eurovision week, Jim Dickinson goes from Bucharest to Chișinău to get across the HE reform agenda for Europe’s least visited country
· SUs · Members
Welsh student welfare: What new rules require – and what SUs can now push for
Jim Dickinson sets out Medr’s new staff and learner welfare condition for Welsh universities, in force from 1 August 2026, and what Welsh SUs can push providers on as they carry out their annual self-evaluation.
With Wonkhe SUs explainer
· Wonk Corner
More straw clutching from the free speech absolutists
The latest of the increasingly desperate attempts to shore up both the Office for Students (OfS) and its free speech tsar Arif Ahmed comes from Abhishek Saha, who’s a professor of maths at Queen Mary and a founder member
· Comment
Euro visions: Liberté, égalité, déjeuner
For Day Three of Eurovision week, Jim Dickinson tours Europe’s student meal subsidies – and finds the UK alleviating student food insecurity via declining food banks and the odd free apple
· Comment
Euro visions: Knowledge creates the future, the future needs democracy
On Day Two of Eurovision week, Jim Dickinson reports from Vienna on a higher education strategy that names democracy as a core mission – and asks what happens if the populists it opposes form the next government
· Comment
Euro visions: Key changes and wind machines won’t save the sector
With populism closing in on Europe’s universities, Jim Dickinson reads finds a new King’s volume that grasps only half of a post-war bargain breaking on both sides
· SUs · Members
Page not found
With Mack Marshall
· Comment
Preventing sexual misconduct is about risky people and places, not bulletproof policy
As OfS publishes a second cut of its sexual misconduct survey, Jim Dickinson argues the data offers providers a risk-assessment framework rather than a compliance scorecard
· Policy Watch
NMC splits the difference on nursing and midwifery hours
Jim Dickinson unpacks the NMC’s nursing and midwifery proposals – and finds a regulator setting standards without the funding architecture to deliver them
· Comment
(At least) thirteen ways in which OfS’s guidance on free speech may now need to change
OfS guidance was supposed to help providers navigate the free speech duty. Jim Dickinson argues it now does the opposite
· Wonk Corner
Just don’t mention the F word
There was a time, not all that long ago, when free tuition was a political pledge – a line in a manifesto designed to differentiate one party’s retail offer from another’s.
· SUs · Members
The essential (revised and updated) guide for SUs to the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023
Jim Dickinson updates Wonkhe’s guide to the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023, covering what the duties mean for SUs and the debates over political diversity and no-platforming that prompted it.
With Wonkhe SUs explainer
· Comment
Students should feel safe on campus. So what’s the plan?
OfS has spent years regulating outcomes for groups with protected characteristics, but rarely their experience. Jim Dickinson argues that Keir Starmer’s antisemitism announcement accidentally points at a fix
· SUs · Members
The £33.3 million clown show
With Mack Marshall