FEBRUARY AT CDBU: This month, we were pleased to launch a new ‘Book Review’ section of our blog. We will be posting regular reviews of higher education and topical books. If you would like to suggest a book for us to review, would like to author a review yourself, or have even recently published a...Read More

Ministers are understood to be considering lowering the student loan repayment threshold to £23,000, or an average increase of £400 in repayments per year. The decision has been met with widespread criticism and concern about how this might affect those on lower incomes, particularly in the wake of the pandemic. NUS Vice President for Higher...Read More

Top universities including Durham, York and Manchester have employed specialist investigators to deal with a rapid rise in reported sexual assault cases, with some paying investigators up to £10,000 per case. This follows the publication of a new anonymous testimonial site, Everyone’s Invited, which has amassed nearly 50,000 testimonies of sexual assault, harassment and misogyny...Read More

Universities dish out cash ‘bribes’ to students with unconditional offers to hit their grades i newspaper, 17/08/2018, Richard Vaughan Universities have been accused of dishing out cash “bribes” to students with unconditional offers of places to stop them slacking off before taking A-levels. Institutions are promising the financial incentives, worth up to £3,00, to students...Read More

The use of terms like ‘loan’ and ‘debt’ to describe student finance are completely misleading, argues Professor Dorothy Bishop In February 2018, the House of Commons Treasury Committee published a remarkable report entitled ‘Student Loans’. A response by government, added on 11 May, reveals little engagement with criticisms raised by the committee, though it does...Read More

Student loans and the problem of how to widen access have been in the news again – while the post-1992 universities are about to take a big financial hit   DfE ‘failed’ to monitor UK Student Loans Company Times Higher Education, 11/05/2018, Ellie Bothwell The UK government failed to effectively oversee the Student Loans Company...Read More