In this HEPI Report, Nick Petford, Robert Griggs and Terry Neville explore the rationale and development of the University of Northampton's Waterside Campus, one of the UK's most ambitious university relocation projects. They conclude with a series of lessons learned.

The sudden closure of higher education providers is virtually unknown among publicly funded higher education institutions in the UK, but "market exit" is commonplace among private higher education providers. The UK government is actively championing the expansion of private higher education providers despite a dearth of research on the…

The decision of whether and where to attend higher education is an inherently geographical decision. Amongst the structural inequalities that determine how decisions about higher education are made are a number of complex socio-spatial factors ranging from proximity of higher education institution to place of residence and availability of…

Positioning strategy and ranking are critical issues in an increasingly competitive higher education landscape. Unless there is conceptual congruence between positioning strategies and rankings, the signals may become diffused and confusing for prospective students. This paper seeks the congruence between positioning strategies and ranking. Since…

The purpose of this study was to explore differences in time spent practicing and the practice strategies used by Chinese music majors according to university location, instrument played, and participant gender. A total of 154 participants who played string, woodwind, brass, and keyboard instruments, including 103 participants attending Chinese…

Each month, the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) surveys a random sample of individuals who three months prior registered on mba.com--the GMAC™ website for prospective graduate business students. Their survey responses provide an inside look into the decision-making process of people currently considering applying to a graduate…

This article explores the factors affecting the content of universities' mission statements. We conceptualize missions as identity narratives, a type of symbolic representation of an organization. Based on the literature on organizational identity we argue that universities need to address two major challenges when crafting their mission…

This article explores the patterning of student im/mobility internally within the United Kingdom, using exceptionally detailed student records data on full-time undergraduate entrants from 2014. For this cohort of students, geographic mobility was clearly the preserve of the most socio-economically advantaged, and was less common for Pakistani and…

The fiercely competitive HE market has led HEIs to invest significant resources in building a distinct identity. An HEI's location forms an inherent part of its identity and the uniqueness of location offers an opportunity to differentiate. However there has been limited examination of how location is used by HEIs and little consideration of how…

This article examines the differences in the location of study of immigrant adults aged 25 to 64 with a university education (i.e., with at least a bachelor's degree). It provides results by period of immigration (pre-1990, the 1990s, and the 2000s) and provides a more in-depth analysis of factors that are linked to the location of study for the…

This article presents findings from the first major study to investigate lexical variation and change in British Sign Language (BSL) number signs. As part of the BSL Corpus Project, number sign variants were elicited from 249 deaf signers from eight sites throughout the UK. Age, school location, and language background were found to be significant…

Higher Education (HE) is experiencing disruption from technologies, demographics, the globalising world and longer life expectancy. Historically Higher Education has had a legacy of being seen as the requirement for an educated "elite", there has been a policy ambition set in various countries (including the UK) for it to become the…

Branding is now widely used by higher education (HE) institutions, yet questions still surround the transference of private sector concepts to a university context. This article reports on findings from studies that investigated the brand promises of four UK universities--one from each of the HE "mission groups." The evidence indicated…

The introduction of the new UK tuition fees resulted in concerns about the impact on higher education (HE) uptake, and raised questions regarding students' motivations for attending university. The current study explored first-year undergraduate psychology students' (N = 56) reasons for attending HE through a series of focus groups. These were…

This study adopted a quantitative methodology involving a matched sample of federated and non-federated schools and utilising multilevel modelling techniques to explore the impact of federations on student outcomes. The sample involves a total of 50 school districts and 264 schools. These are grouped into 122 federations; 264 comparator schools…