Transforming student outcomes through mission-aligned investment: the case for a national graduate-funded endowment

ABSTRACT

This essay, shortlisted for the AHUA Dr Jonathan Nicholls Memorial Essay Prize, addresses recent policy attention on student maintenance funding in the United Kingdom. It proposes the establishment of a graduate-funded endowment in lieu of other measures such as increased parental contributions or the imposition of a graduate tax. After discussing the relationship between maintenance funding and student outcomes, the essay then envisages how voluntary graduate contributions could be pooled into a national endowment, and how this endowment might address access and participatory inequalities relating to student expenditure on housing, energy, food and care. Although presented here only as a broad idea, the essay discusses how this could be achieved through investment in, as well as the incubation of, social enterprises aligned with the endowment’s purpose – to ensure that maintenance costs do not restrict access and impair student outcomes, and to do so in a sustainable and prudential way.

KEYWORDS:

• Student funding
• higher education access
• graduate tax
• maintenance support

Acknowledgements

The author acknowledges the AHUA who invited essays on the theme of making higher education better, a fitting and touching commemoration of the legacy of Dr Jonathan Nicholls. This was written in response to that invitation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lydia Dye-Stonebridge

Lydia Dye-Stonebridge has worked in academic publishing, local government and higher education policy. She is currently pursuing an MA in Philosophy of Education at the Institute of Education, University College London.