Dr Jack Britton

Higher Education funding in England: past, present and options for the future

This Executive Summary accompanies a new IFS working paper which uses administrative data to measure how the earnings of English graduates around 10 years into the labour market vary with gender, institution attended, subject and socioeconomic background.

This paper uses tax and student loan administrative data to measure how the earnings of English graduates around 10 years into the labour market vary with gender, institution attended, subject and socioeconomic background.

We exploit wage regulation to examine the impact of pay on school performance and analyse data from over 3000 schools containing around 200,000 teachers who educate around half a million children per year.

The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills launched a public consultation regarding the proposal on 22 July 2015. This short note was submitted to the consultation and extends the work of Briefing Note 174 (Britton, Crawford and Dearden, 2015), analysing the likely implications of the proposed changes for students entering university in 2016-17.

The authors find that very broadly the LFS (Labour Force Survey) and administrative data show a similar distribution of graduates’ earnings. However, the administrative data has considerably less gender disparity, higher high quantiles and more time series persistence. The authors also report on how the distribution of graduate and non-graduate earnings fell during each year of the Great Recession.

This briefing note analyses the higher education funding reforms announced by the Chancellor in the Summer Budget 2015.

This report analyses the impact of abolishing the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) in 2011. We show that this reduced Year 12 participation by around 1.5 percentage points.