Professor Lorraine Dearden

A socially mobile country provides equal opportunities for everyone, across big cities and small towns, and regardless of whether your parents are rich or poor. This report makes use of newly linked administrative data on all state-educated pupils born between 1986 and 1988 to follow a group of sons from where they grew up, looking at their family circumstances and their educational achievement, through to the labour market.

The Japanese higher education sector has seen increases in tuition with stagnant household incomes in a society where family support for university students has been the norm. Student loans from the government have grown rapidly to sustain the gradual increase in university enrolments. These time-based repayment loans (TBRLs) have created financial hardship for increasing numbers of loan recipients and their families. There is some evidence that prospective students from low-income households are forgoing a university education to avoid student loan debt. The Japanese government has introduced some measures including grants and a partial income-contingent loan (ICL) scheme to help alleviate these problems.

This paper simulates student loan schemes for Brazil. A copula approach is applied to simulate dynamic earnings paths for graduates. Repayment patterns are then simulated for time-based and income-contingent loan designs.

To understand and design student loan systems, realistic earnings and/or income projections for current and future graduates are crucial. In this paper, Current Population Survey (CPS) data from the US is used to demonstrate empirical approaches that can be exploited to simulate lifetime income and earnings profiles for graduates which are needed to understand and design effective and sustainable student loan systems.

There is wide agreement that the US student loan system faces significant problems. Seven million borrowers are in default and many more are not repaying for reasons such as returning to school, or economic hardship. The stress of repayments faced by many students results at least in part from the design of US student loans. Specifically, loans are organised like a mortgage, with fixed monthly repayments over a fixed period of time, creating a high repayment burden on borrowers with low income. This paper draws on the experience of the income-contingent loan (ICL) systems operating in England and Australia, in which monthly or two-weekly repayments are related to the borrower's income in that period, thus building in automatic insurance against inability to repay during periods of low income.

Graduates from higher income families (with median income of around £77,000) have average earnings which are 20% higher than those from lower income families (with median income of around £26,000). Once we condition on institution and subject choices, this premium roughly halves, to around 10%.

This report estimates the impact on earnings of attending HE compared with not going. The authors detail how this varies by subject and institution of study, as well as how these returns vary by gender, prior educational attainment and the sorts of subjects individuals have studied up to age 18. The report makes use of the Longitudinal Education Outcomes (LEO) dataset, which links together tax, benefit, higher education and school records to provide a rich description of individuals’ trajectories through the education system and into the labour market.

There is a lack of evidence of the adverse effects of air pollution and pollen on cognition for people with air quality related health conditions. This study explored the effects of air quality and respiratory health conditions on educational attainment for 18,241 pupils across the city of Cardiff, United Kingdom.

There is a lack of evidence on the adverse effects of air pollution on cognition for people with air quality-related health conditions. We propose that educational attainment, as a proxy for cognition, may increase with improved air quality. This study will explore whether asthma and seasonal allergic rhinitis, when exacerbated by acute exposure to air pollution, is associated with educational attainment.

The Secure Anonymised Information Linkage (SAIL) databank facilitated linkage of routinely collected health and education data, high spatial resolution pollution modelling and daily pollen measurements for 18,241 pupils in 7 cross-sectional cohorts across Cardiff city, UK, to investigate effects of air quality and respiratory health conditions on education attainment.

It is well known that the average graduate earns more than non graduates, and that university graduates from certain subjects and from certain universities earn considerably more than others. For example, five years after graduation, men from the highest earnings universities earn almost 50% more than graduates from other Russell Group universities (30% for women), while male Russell Group graduates earn over 40% more than those who attended the average post-1992 institution (35% for women).

We summarise the recent evidence produced by the IFS which relates to the post-18 funding review.

We used national data to study differences in academic achievement between 5-year-old children with an isolated oral cleft and the general population. We also assessed differences by cleft type.