HEPI’s website notched up its one millionth page view

At around 9.30pm last night, HEPI’s website notched up its one millionth page view since its last wholesale revamp.

As it is the time of year when the music charts fill up with greatest hits collections, we are marking this milestone by listing our Top 40 most popular posts over the (roughly) five-year period.

A topic can only feature once – for example, where a HEPI news release and the accompanying publication both had separate entries, only the top one has been counted.

It is notable how often some themes reappear.

• As a higher education body, we do not focus all that often on schools and A-Levels but, when we do, the posts tend to score thousands of hits – Mary Curnock Cook’s analyses of A-Level results in 2019 and 2018 appear at positions 1 and 31.
• The annual HEPI / Advance HE Student Academic Experience Survey is a firm favourite from year to year, and takes three of the top 10 slots and six places overall. This is perhaps not surprising as the Survey includes the best available data on contact hours and workload, undergraduate wellbeing and students’ perceptions of value for money.
• Our work on the benefits to the UK of international students, undertaken with London Economics and Kaplan, has also had broad resonance, with two entries in the Top 10 and all three of our joint reports featuring in the Top 40.

Otherwise, we are pleased to see some of the reports of which we are most proud, such as those on male educational underachievement, student and staff mental health and our work with Unite Students on applicants’ expectations of higher education, make the list. It is perhaps not surprising, given the lively political situation in the past few years, that some of our polling and commentary on student voters also make the grade.

Only one of the entries, and the very last one, is primarily about Oxbridge. So, hopefully, this is evidence that we generally try to resist the lure of our oldest institutions and prefer to write about the UK higher education sector more broadly.

1. A Level Analysis 2019: Blood Pressure Alert for English and Mathematics (2019)
2. New study shows the benefits of international students are ten times greater than the costs – and are worth £310 per UK resident (2018)
3. 2015 HEPI-HEA Student Academic Experience Survey (2015)
4. 2017 Student Academic Experience Survey (2017)
5. Upending the rankings: Benchmarking widening participation in universities (2018)
6. Should students be free to register with different doctors for home and away? (2017)
7. Keeping up with the Germans: What can Germany teach the UK on fees, migration and research? (2015)
8. Are degree standards the same at all universities? (2018)
9. 2018 Student Academic Experience Survey (2018)
10. Universities could lose students while gaining financially from Brexit, but any new restrictions on international students could cost the UK economy an additional £2 billion a year (2017)
11. Students will be given more than 1.5 million wrong GCSE, AS and A level grades this summer. Here are some potential solutions. Which do you prefer? (2019)
12. The invisible problem? Improving students’ mental health (2016)
13. New HEPI report reveals the underachievement of young men in higher education – and calls on the sector to do more to tackle the problem (2016)
14. University applicants set for shock to the system (2017)
15. HEPI-HEA 2016 Student Academic Experience Survey (2016)
16. Confused about where the political parties stand on tuition fees? You will be… (2019)
17. New report calls for comprehensive universities to improve social mobility (2017)
18. 10 points about the higher education green paper (2015)
19. The university has become an anxiety machine (2019)
20. It’s the finance, stupid! The decline of part-time higher education and what to do about it (2015)
21. The HEPI / HEA 2014 Student Academic Experience Survey (2014)
22. Rebooting learning for the digital age: What next for technology- enhanced higher education? (2017)
23. The student vote: does it matter in 2019? Which seats could it affect? How is Corbyn faring among students? (2019)
24. Universities have lost the country: Here’s how UUK must reform to win it back (2019)
25. Over two-thirds (68%) of students now back Labour, but most of them think Labour (55%) and Jeremy Corbyn (58%) back Remain (2017)
26. What are the biggest challenges facing higher education in 2018? (2018)
27. Demand for Higher Education to 2030 (2018)
28. Going for Gold: Lessons from the TEF provider submissions (2017)
29. New research suggests levels of independent study are more important than contact hours in determining how much students learn (2018)
30. Employability: Degrees of value (2015)
31. Some new perspectives on the 2018 A level results: STEM gap remains but decline in foreign languages exaggerated (2018)
32. Four ways the Augar review impacts on Widening Participation in higher education (2019)
33. 1 school exam grade in 4 is wrong. That’s the good news… (2019)
34. Student Academic Experience Survey 2019 (2019)
35. Just one cohort of international students who stay in the UK to work pay £3.2 billion in tax – and they aren’t taking jobs from UK citizens (2019)
36. Grammar schools significantly increase the chances of disadvantaged pupils reaching highly-selective universities, especially Oxbridge (2019)
37. The 2017 Student Academic Experience Results: Teaching is improving but students want better value for money (2017)
38. Comment on the National Student Survey results (and why the NSS needs another revamp) (2019)
39. HEPI publishes ideas for reducing racial inequality in higher education (2019)
40. Oxbridge students work harder, are more satisfied and get better value for money than other students but have less creative and original teaching (2018)