The rising costs of tertiary education have imposed an increasing private financial burden on graduates, many of whom must embark upon post-college life with substantial levels of debt. For example, in the United States over the past 20 years posted tuition and fees at private national universities have increased about 40%, even adjusting for inflation, while tuition and fees at public national universities have risen by about 38% for out-of-state students or 56% for their in-state counterparts. This experience has not been unique to the United States with large tuition increases occurring in other countries. Concurrently, the opportunities to access tertiary education remain unequal and are likely to be exacerbated by these growing costs.
To address these issues, governments have adopted a range of polices to alleviate student debt while expanding access to educational opportunities. Such policies can have both fairness and fiscal cost implications, and—depending on the mix of specific measures pursued—may not address the root causes of increasing tertiary costs, nor the possible tradeoffs between quality, cost, equity, and the broader social benefits of research. This one-day academic conference featured sessions on addressing the challenges with expanding access to higher education and their associated funding systems and a policy panel on what lessons we can learn from models and experiences from around the world.
This event was co-sponsored by the Georgetown University Global Economic Challenges Network, the Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and the Centre for Education Policy and Equalising Opportunities and the Social Research Unit at University College London.
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Sir Richard Blundell, CBE, holds the David Ricardo Chair of Political Economy at University College London, where he was appointed professor of economics in 1984. He was the founding director of the Economic and Social Research Council Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy (CPP) at the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), where he was research director from 1986 to 2016 and is currently co-director and research fellow at IFS CPP. He holds honorary doctorates from the University of St. Gallen, Norwegian School of Economics, University of Mannheim, Universita della Svizzera, University of Bristol, University of Venice Ca’Foscari, and Athens School of Economics. He was knighted in the 2014 New Year’s Honours list for services to economics and social science and was awarded the Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2006; he was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1997. He was recipient of the 1995 Yrjö Jahnsson Prize, the 2000 Frisch Prize, the 2008 Jean-Jacques Laffont Prize, the 2015 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Prize in Economics, the 2016 Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics, and the 2020 Jacob Mincer Prize in Labor Economics.
Jack Britton is a reader of economics at the University of York and a research fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, where he was previously an associate director. He has expertise in the economics of education, particularly higher education and higher education finance. Over the past few years, he has led a large program of research using newly linked administrative datasets to improve understanding of the labor market outcomes of U.K. higher education students.
Bruce J. Chapman is emeritus professor of economics at the College of Business and Economics at the Australian National University. He has a Ph.D. from Yale University and has had published around 300 papers and articles and several books and edited volumes, mostly in the area of higher education financing and applied labor economics. He helped motivate and design Australia's income contingent student loans system, implemented in 1989, and has been heavily involved in research and policy related to the design and redesign of student loan systems in about 15 other countries. In 2022, Chapman won the Outstanding Public Policy Impact Prize from the U.K. Economic and Social Research Council for his work analyzing higher education financing policy in Colombia.
Lorraine Dearden is professor of economics and social statistics in the Social Research Unit at University College London, an elected fellow at the Academy of Social Sciences, and a trustee of the Nuffield Foundation. She has over 30 years of experience and significant international publications in the area of higher education funding and access, including detailed analyses of student loan issues in countries such as the United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, Chile, Malaysia, Brazil, and most recently Colombia and Indonesia. In 2022, Dearden won the Outstanding Public Policy Impact Prize from the U.K. Economic and Social Research Council for her work analyzing higher education financing policy in Colombia.
Susan Dynarski is a professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and is a faculty research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Dynarski earned an A.B. in social studies from Harvard University, a master of public policy from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technoogy. Dynarski’s research focuses on understanding and reducing inequality in education. She uses large-scale datasets and quantitative methods of causal inference to understand the effects educational interventions including college access and funding. The National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators awarded her the Robert P. Huff Golden Quill Award for excellence in research on student aid. The Chronicle of Higher Education named her a Top Ten Influencer in 2015.
Sam Freedman is a freelance writer and a senior fellow at the Institute for Government. He is also a senior advisor to the education charity Ark and previously was CEO of Education Partnerships Group, which supports governments in Sub-Saharan Africa to develop education policy. He worked at the U.K. Department for Education as a senior policy advisor to Michael Gove from 2010 to 2013. After that he worked at the United Kingdom’s largest teacher training charity, Teach First, becoming the executive director in charge of recruitment and teacher training.
John N. Friedman is a professor of economics at Brown University, as well as a founding co-director of Opportunity Insights. He studies the causes and consequences of inequality for kids, as well as policies to improve opportunities for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. His work has appeared in top academic journals as well as in major media outlets, has been cited by U.S. President Barack Obama in his 2012 State of the Union Address, and has shaped policies at the U.S. federal, state, and local levels. He worked at the National Economic Council as special assistant to the president for economic policy during the Obama administration. He is also a research associate at National Bureau of Economic Research, a member of the Treasury Advisory Council on Racial Equity for the U.S. Department of the Treasury, and co-editor of the American Economic Review.
Lindsey MacMillan is the founding director of the Centre for Education Policy and Equalising Opportunities (CEPEO), creating new research to inform evidence-led education policy and wider practice to equalize opportunities across the life course. She is also a research fellow in the education and skills sector at the Institute for Fiscal Studies and a visiting professor at the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion at the London School of Economics. MacMillan is an elected member of the Scottish Economic Society Council and co-editor of Education Economics.
Francis Vella is the Edmond V. Villani Professor at Georgetown University and a research associate of Centre for Microdata Methods and Practice (CEMMAP), Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), and Institute of Labor Economics (IZA). He is an elected fellow of the Econometric Society and the International Association for Applied Econometrics. He is a co-editor of the Journal of Applied Econometrics.
Anna Vignoles, CBE, is director of the Leverhulme Trust, having previously been professor of education at the University of Cambridge. An economist of education, her research focused on issues of equity and value in education, as well as the role played by education and skills in the economy and wider society. She was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 2017 and awarded the Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2019 for services to social sciences. Vignoles is a member of the Council of the Royal Economic Society and was previously a trustee of the Nuffield Foundation, a member of the Council of the Economic and Social Research Council, and a member of the Advisory Board of the Sutton Trust.
Gill Wyness is a professor of economics and deputy director of the Centre for Education Policy and Equalising Opportunities (CEPEO) at the University College London Institute of Education. She is also a research associate at the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics. Her main research area is the economics of higher education, particularly inequalities in university participation and attainment along with the drivers of this—including higher education finance, information advice and guidance, and school factors. Her work has been published in the Journal of Labor Economics, Economics of Education Review, the Oxford Review of Economic Policy, and the Journal of Human Capital.
Schedule
10:45 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. BST | Registration
11:00 a.m. – 11:10 a.m. BST | Welcome Remarks
Sir Richard Blundell, University College London
11:10 a.m. – 12:40 p.m. | Session 1, chaired by Georgetown University Professor Francis Vella
- John Friedman, Brown University, “Higher Education and Upward Mobility, What Can We Learn from Big Data?”
- Gill Wyness, University College London, “Widening Access to Higher Education in the UK”
12:40 p.m. – 1:30 p.m. | Lunch
1:30 p.m. – 3:40 p.m. | Session 2, chaired by University College London Professor Lorraine Dearden
- Bruce Chapman, Australian National University, "Designing Higher Education Funding Systems: Issues, Challenges, and Lessons from Around the World”
- Jack Britton, University of York, “Challenges for Higher Education Funding in the UK”
- Susan Dynarski, Harvard University, “U.S. College Access and Funding Issues: Problems and Potential Solutions”
3:40 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. | Coffee Break
4:00 p.m. – 5:30 p.m. | Session 3: Policy Panel chaired by Leverhulme Foundation Professor Anna Vignoles: Challenges, Pitfalls, and Lessons from Funding Models around the World
- Lorraine Dearden, Harvard Graduate School of Education
- Susan Dynarski, Harvard University
- Sam Freedman, Institute for Government
5:30 p.m. – 6:30 p.m. | Cocktail Reception