It wouldn’t be higher education without a reading list. As we welcome our inaugural Class of 2027 cohort for Making Sense of Higher Education we thought we’d mark the occasion by putting together the ultimate Team Wonkhe recommended reading for higher education professionals.

Our professional lives already include a fair bit of reading, whether that’s meeting papers, research reports, or media commentary. We also love reading for its own sake in our various niche interest areas. So for us to want to read something about, or adjacent to, higher education in our own time it has to offer something that either makes us excited, because it’s giving us fresh ideas and energy, or something that’s pretty efficient at communicating complex ideas in an accessible way.

We’re also, full disclosure, weird and varied in our interests. Our recommendations don’t follow any particular scheme or system, it’s just how we make sense of our sector – Jim pairs up political analysis with practical insight from his SU study tours, Debbie, when she’s not reading parenting guides and romance fantasy, loves a “state of the nation for HE” tome, Michael prefers a more sober historical analysis, and DK loves to relax with HESA’s data collection manual. Jim Coe has even written his own book about higher education: The New University, but in his own time he reads dystopian fiction about the perils of technology.

To keep up to speed with what’s happening right now in higher education and research we obviously heartily recommend these august pages, and our sister sites The Post-18 Project and Research Agenda. But to dip into the archives and the writing and projects that shaped the way we think about HE today, read on.

Debbie’s recommendations

If I could boil down what I’m interested in I think I’d probably land somewhere in the “how do you take resources and structures and systems and organise them into something that changes people’s lives?” camp. That’s arguably what brings together my otherwise disparate interests in learning and teaching practice, public value and civic engagement, and the leadership, culture and organisational habits of higher education institutions.

From the Wonkhe archive:

Debbie McVitty and Adam Matthews’ Wonkhe series on how HE shows up in general election manifestos in each decade since 1945 (2024). We combed every main party manifesto for each election to map what pledges politicians think the voting public wants to hear. If you believe HE is entering its “post-liberal” era, you’ll be struck by the degree of consensus on the importance of expansion.

Sunday Blake, Anna Jackson and Gail Capper, Building belonging in higher education (2022) – the OG research report into student belonging post-pandemic, based on a combination of a large-scale student survey, qualitative insight from students and lots of discussion with the sector. The term has lost some of its salience in the interim but the core insight is still relevant, especially the “four foundations.”

Wonkhe and Advance HE, Looking outward: the changing people needs of higher education in the years ahead (2023). This research report saw us interview heads of institution from across the globe, exploring how their strategies are changing and how that affects decisions about staffing, skills, and the culture of the HE profession.

Jim Dickinson and Mack Marshall, Trained to stop learning? How students are experiencing assessment and learning in the age of AI (2026). A comprehensive exploration of students’ perspectives on, attitudes to, and worries about AI and their learning. Teaches us that students are well able to get involved in discussions about appropriate AI use, and that accountability for learning remains critical.

Books:

Brian Rosenberg, “Whatever it is, I’m against it”: resistance to change in higher education (2023). Former US college president Rosenberg explores the systemic reasons why change in HE is hard. This podcast offers an accessible introduction to Rosenberg’s arguments (and the podcast itself, World of Higher Education, hosted by Canadian HE maven Alex Usher is a cracking listen).

Paul Ashwin, Transforming university education: a manifesto (2020). UK professor of higher education Paul Ashwin applies everything he knows about academic quality to make a bracing case for why higher education is about knowledge – not skills, not employability, and certainly not about rankings performance.

Cathy N. Davidson, The new education: how to revolutionise the university to prepare students for a world in flux (2017). Davidson is among a handful of “hero professors” in the US context who has built a profile around education innovation – but don’t let that put you off from following her invigorating argument about how students need to cross disciplinary boundaries if they are to be ready for the world they will graduate into, and what that looks like in practice in different teaching contexts.

If you prefer your discussion of curriculum to be a bit more UK-based, then Dilly Fung’s A connected curriculum for higher education (2017) explores the ways that taught curriculum can connect students to research, “real-world” challenges, other disciplines, and each other.

And for a bonus, bang up to the minute, my current read, former Southern New Hampshire University president Paul Le Blanc, Reclaiming purpose – the university in an AI world (2026). Strongly recommended by Mary Curnock Cook, Le Blanc posits that when AI can do all the knowledge work, universities need to lean more into what students are becoming, as well as what they know.

Jim Coe’s recommendations

Research and innovation is about labs, libraries, and the people that work in them, but more importantly it’s a promise that spending money today will make massive returns tomorrow in new ideas and products that make society happier, healthier, and wealthier.

One of my pet peeves about research and innovation policy is that it can be made out to be this deeply complicated thing beyond the reach of those with only a passing interest in what is going on. If you believe being engaged in research is worth all of our time there are fewer better publications than the House of Commons Library briefing on research and development spending to get you started.

Of course, how much money is spent is not nearly as important as where it is spent. If your friends keep asking you to provide a summary of industrial strategies from the 1970s until the present day, which I am sure they do, the Competitions and Markets Authority has a briefing packed with timelines and international comparators (and more!) If you would rather know how governments continually waste money on freeports, innovation zones, and things that look like but are not always called enterprise zones then it’s over to Research Agenda for Innovation policy needs imagination – not constant repackaging of the enterprise zone dream.

If you have spent even ten seconds in your local research office you will have heard about the big shake-ups going on at UKRI. The national funder’s concept of “buckets” of funding for different kinds of research is well explained by Ben Johnson over on Substack while you can read about them directly from UKRI chief executive Ian Chapman on Wonkhe. If you want to dive into the forever debates on the Research Excellence Framework including on how culture should be measured, whether portability will work, and whether research is about individuals or institutions there is a whole archive for you on the site. If that is not enough research culture for you Lizzie Gadd’s My research culture is better than yours is particularly illuminating.

As with any debates on how public money is spent there is also a lot of politics. Devolution is a means not an end for research, looks at how Andy Burnham’s devolution agenda will shape research policy in the years to come. Further afield, Sapna Marwaha in Research security, science diplomacy, and geopolitical fracture takes a strategic look at science diplomacy and its implications for universities.

There are plenty of policy reports to get stuck into here so for a bit of speculative fiction try Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow which is either a love story or a cautionary tale of how markets can corrupt socially good innovation, depending how you look at it. If you think the next logical step for AI is to sell our dreams to for-profit-prisons, it is Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel. And, if you want a novel to throw your phone into the sea to, it is David Egger’s nightmare of the internet in the 2010s, The Circle.

DK’s recommendations

Data and finance are two topics where numbers are the focus, but the decisions and processes behind them are where the policy is found – and represent, for me, some of the most interesting writing about higher education and the modern world more widely.

From Wonkhe’s archive:

Every year I attempt to map what annual updates to our major data collections can tell us about higher education in a series called HESA Spring (this is the 2026 iteration, but by the time we get to our Making Sense of Higher Education session on data we will be well into the 2027 season). These tell two stories – what the numbers can say about the changing size, shape, and preoccupations of the sector; and how changes to the collection and use of data reveal new policy priorities.

Early in 2026 Wonkhe worked with BUFDG to bring you a caveated early analysis of data from annual financial statements. Rather than waiting for HESA’s finance open data release (which is useful in other ways) we prioritised speed over completeness to draw directly from the audited financial statements that underpin annual financial returns. This highlighted, among other things, the way in which differences in the way the rules enshrined in the Statement of Recommended Practice (SORP) can affect the way financial health is perceived.

There has been a quiet shift in the way we think about graduate data – I’ve been cheered by Tej Nathwani’s work on understanding the ways in which we can draw conclusions from a Graduate Outcomes collection with declining response rates. The Institute for Fiscal Studies and the LEO team in the Department for Education have both recently released data on the graduate premium – a factor that appears, in most cases, to exist (for now, anyway).

Books:

I could be dull here and link to technical manuals and methodology statements – the things you need to read to work with sector data effectively and with an understanding of what the numbers really mean. HESA’s data collection manuals and collection quality reports are a good starting point for unpicking assumptions, and on financial statements BUFDG’s superb Understanding Finance series will prevent you from embarrassing yourself on Newsnight by claiming we can fund staff pay from “sector reserves.” Instead I’m going to give you some wider reading about data, society, and the way both affect the human condition.

You don’t need me to tell you how good Ed Conway’s Material World was, but I’d urge you not to sleep on the sequel. Trade World traces the myriad decisions that define where things are made – and if you laboured under the impression your jeans were made in the US and your bread in the UK just because that is what it said on the label it has some disquieting news for you. It highlights perfectly the sheer complexity of our purchasing and sourcing decisions. When logistics chains break down and geopolitics reasserts borders and boundaries this has a meaningful impact on what you can buy, where you can buy it and how much you will pay.

Sarah O’Connor’s We are not machines is for me, the first proper analysis of the way large language models (commonly called AI) are affecting the work that people do. The lazy parallel is with the growth of mechanisation in the 1800s and automation in the early 1990s and beyond; O’Connor problematises this: situating neo-Fordist assumptions within a battle that is raging around the value and purpose of humanity. But for every cautionary tale of translators and warehouse staff becoming progressively disengaged with work via decisions made for them there is something (nordic miners!) that demonstrates what can happen where practical expertise has a voice.

I’m a huge fan of Quinn Slobodian’s writing. As an academic historian, his later works examine the structures, philosophies, and assumptions that underpin the recent rise of the far right across the west. Hayek’s Bastards highlights the human essentialist strand of thought that was reverse-engineered from the wreckage of what we might call classical (Mont Pelerin) neoliberalism and has driven the disquieting contemporary interest in human difference (be that disability, racial or gender identity, or even the curious resurgence of IQ testing). Data categorisation is, after all, an act of violence against the individual – the categories we put people in exist for administrative convenience and should not shape personal definition or self-worth.

Michael’s recommendations

Two of the first books that popped into my head to recommend were Robert Birnbaum’s Management Fads in Higher Education and Tom Bewick’s Skills Policy in Britain and the Future of Work, which demonstrates that I am clearly a fan of books which trace historical developments while finding that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

The first looks at trends in higher education management in the USA in the second half of the twentieth century, but has a lot to say about how universities continually try to find new operating approaches while struggling with the same challenges around organisational change and human tendencies. Tom Bewick’s book looks at the relentless churn of skills policy initiatives in the UK, and given the HE policy direction of travel it’s something that we would all do well to swot up on.

I was going to recommend Material World and We Are Not Machines, but I see DK has beaten me to it. So instead in the not-exactly-HE-but-very-relevant space I will give an endorsement to Fiona Fox’s Beyond the Hype: Inside Science's Biggest Media Scandals from Climategate to Covid. On Wonkhe, you can learn a surprising amount about the sector by following Hugh Jones’ postcards.

Jim’s recommendations

I try not to read about higher education. I read about politics, power, people and place, all of which end up being about higher education whether I like it or not. Find a job you love doing, I guess.

From Wonkhe’s archives:

A glass of Sangria, my cake and some time to eat it please (2013) was the first thing I ever wrote for Wonkhe, and I have been remixing the same argument ever since – that students are capable of being two things at once, and that there’s no contradiction between learner and consumer once you listen to them rather than treat them like lab rats.

Doing better, getting better: getting a grip on the full-time student experience (The Post-18 Project, 2025). This is my Now! album of everything I think about the student experience – the “full-time” student working close to 50 hours a week across study and paid work, the stretched-out middle stage of life that the offer needs to be re-designed around, and ten things students ought to be entitled to expect as a result.

Students need to know the secret codes to success at university (2022). For me, there’s nothing worse, and in policy terms more damaging, than “when I was a student” syndrome – where nostalgia for youth in the context of a smaller and more diverse sector causes all sorts of people to propose stupid things. In my gap year, I travelled and worked…

As HE expands, if we’re not careful more really will mean less (2023). Written on the coach back from a study tour with SUs of the Low Countries, where we found a system built to enable students take part in the life of the place rather than just complete a qualification as cheaply and quickly as possible. See also Our drop-out and pace miracle is harming students’ health and learning.

The end of pretend: AI and the case for universities of formation (2025). Once a machine can produce the essay, the pretence that reproducing information proves understanding is over – and a system built on sorting, proxies and performance has to decide what it is for. My punt is formation – smaller groups, longer relationships, thinking assessed as it happens and a community rather than a content pipeline.

If we must reopen campuses, we mustn’t waste them on teaching (2020). Written in the summer of 2020, when the sector was preparing to run campuses at 50 per cent occupancy and halls at 100 per cent. We know deep down what campuses are for, and we know what higher education is for too. The struggle to admit what those things are survived the pandemic.

Lessons from the A47 (and the university bubble) (2017) is what a year of days on campus in Norwich and nights in pubs and B&Bs in Great Yarmouth taught me about how HE looks from the places it doesn’t recruit from. I’ve aged more than the argument, I think.

Books:

Mike Day and Jim Dickinson, David versus Goliath: the past, present and future of students’ unions in the UK (HEPI, 2018). More Mike’s work than mine, this covers students’ unions from Bologna in 1088 to the present day, mainly to show that student rights, massification, marketisation and free speech are much older arguments than the people currently having them tend to think.

Andrew McGettigan, The great university gamble: money, markets and the future of higher education (2013). Still the best single account of what the 2010 reforms did – to the funding model, to the loan book, to governance and to what universities are for – written while it was happening by someone who could see all the layers of the onion. Most of what has gone wrong since was visible in here first.

Anthony King and Ivor Crewe, The blunders of our governments (2013). The poll tax, the Child Support Agency, the ERM, the Dome, and why clever people in Whitehall keep doing it.

Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans produce apathy in everyday life (1998). Eliasoph spent years with anti-drug volunteers, anti-toxics activists and the regulars at a country-and-western bar, and found that the same people who had plenty to say about power in private would only talk in public about what was “close to home” – the things they could personally fix – on the grounds that anything bigger wasn’t their place.

Gordon Brown, The future starts with us (2026). Brown’s diagnosis, backed by polling of nearly 100,000 people in 45 countries, is that the institutions that used to hold local life together – unions, clubs, churches, youth groups – have hollowed out, that isolated people are easier to turn against each other, and that the cure is active citizenship in rebuilt communities.

Manja Klemenčič (ed), The Bloomsbury handbook of student politics and representation in higher education (Bloomsbury, 2024). The first serious attempt to treat student representation as a global subject in its own right, with chapters from researchers and student leaders on how students get a seat at the table in different systems and what they do once they have one.

Phoenix Andrews, I heart politics: how people power took over the world (2024). The argument is that fandom, not ideology, is the thing that now moves people politically – the same instincts that build a stan account built Brexit and Trump, and also most of the good grassroots movements of the last decade. If you’re keen to understand why a campaign catches fire when a policy paper on the same subject doesn’t, start here.

And one from the LRB – Jenny Turner, Who are they? (2010). It’s nominally a review of a Frank Furedi book on education, but is really the definitive account of how a small Trotskyist party turned into Spiked!, the Institute of Ideas and the free speech absolutists who have spent the past decade eating up all the bandwidth on higher education law and regulation. Fifteen years on, if you want to know where the Free Speech Union came from and why it argues the way it does, this is still the piece to read.

Making Sense of Higher Education begins on 30 September. There’s still time to join the 2026–27 cohort – find out more here.