Attracting international students is critical for public universities in the UK increasingly facing funding cuts and a diminishing domestic youth population. This column discusses how Brexit may have affected students’ willingness to study in the UK and the factors likely driving the students’ choices. Brexit significantly lowered applications from EU students, especially for science, technology, engineering and mathematics subjects and for more selective institutions. International student enrolments also dropped, substantiating concerns regarding the ability to attract international talent.

For most of history, women have been undereducated relative to men. While the gender gap in education has closed – and even reversed – in recent times, sharp differences still exist across levels of education and countries. Even where women have outpaced men in educational attainment, gender gaps in employment, entrepreneurship and politics persist. Women are visibly underrepresented in STEM and economics – fields typically lead to higher employability and wages. This column reviews the historical roots of the gender gap, which, despite changing conditions and incentives, continue to exert an influence through labour markets, family formation dynamics, and cultural factors. 

Reopening universities for the autumn term will be risky for individuals' health and safety. This column describes the latest epidemiological evidence and argues that the biggest influence on individuals’ risk of severe illness is age. Individuals in their sixties face a 30 times higher fatality risk from COVID-19 than individuals in their thirties. Being obese, non-white, a man, and having an underlying health condition also matter – each roughly doubles the fatality risk.  But chronological age still remains the biggest risk – a fact that universities should keep in mind when planning their autumnal schedules.

Many elite universities in the US send recruitment materials to secondary school students in an effort to enlarge their applicant pools. This column focuses on Harvard University and documents a sudden increase in African American applications, driven by those with lower entrance exam scores, which did not result in a larger share of African American admits. It discusses possible motivations for this practice of recruiting applicants, particularly African Americans, who essentially have no chance of being admitted. 

Distance learning technologies are attracting attention as demand for higher education grows around the world, but credible evidence on their effects on students’ outcomes is scarce. This column studies the impact of online live streaming of lectures on student achievement and attendance in a experiment with first-year undergraduate students at the University of Geneva. It finds that students use the live streaming technology only when events make attending class too costly, and that attending lectures via live streaming lowers achievement for low-ability students but increases it for high-ability ones.

Graduates of top universities hold a large share of leadership positions in big firms. At the same time, elite universities are aiming to expand access to middle- and low-income students. Yet, it is unclear whether the benefits of attending top universities accrue to students from poor backgrounds. This column examines new evidence from Chile and finds that admission to highly selective, business-focused degree programmes has very large effects on the rates at which male students from wealthy backgrounds attain top jobs and incomes, but little or no effect for female students and non-wealthy male students.

Feedback has been found to improve exam performance in the context of higher education, but demand for feedback is low among students when obtaining it requires unrewarded effort. This column evaluates how the provision of extrinsic incentives affects students’ effort and performance. Having online learning assessments count towards final grades is found to trigger large participation increases, and better subsequent exam performance. Given the low cost of these interventions, they offer particular promise in higher education.

Growth in higher education has been driven by the view that human capital is essential for economic and social progress. This column uses a comprehensive international dataset covering 78 countries to show that on average, a 10% increase in the number of universities (roughly adding one more university to the average region in the data) increases a region’s income by 0.4%, with additional effects spilling over to other regions within the same country. In the UK context, the benefits of university expansion are likely to far outweigh the costs.

Bad behaviour by peers is well-known to worsen educational outcomes in the short run. This column investigates the long-run effects of peers from families marked by domestic violence. Individual-level US data linking middle and high school test scores, college enrolment, and earnings at ages 24–28 show that students exposed to more disruptive peers experience worse adult outcomes. Policies that mitigate exposure to disruptive peers could pay high dividends.