Fiona

After elite universities took her from County Durham to White House, next Durham chancellor aims to work on spreading benefits of higher education beyond ...

The UK has been through “so many phases” of economic change since “and education hasn’t kept up with it”, she said. Part of her hope for the Durham role was to take a national look at “how higher education can really live up to its promise of having benefits not just for an elite few, but…for communities, for regions and the country at large”. “Well, we’re in a perpetual situation now where both the United Kingdom and United States are not keeping up with the rapidity of [economic] changes and a lot of it is because of this lack of access to education in all forms.” By way of arguing that the UK has “lost the plot” on adult and continuing education, Dr Hill pointed to the scale of the 1918 Education Act, which raised the school leaving age to 14, abolished all fees in state elementary schools and sought to help soldiers returning home after the First World War “adapt to what was already a changing economy”. She added: “I don’t know how much people inside higher education are fully cognisant…about how much the future of higher education is on the line here, in the United Kingdom and United States. Dr Hill, a senior fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution, a US thinktank, has recently been looking at access to higher education in the US for disadvantaged and rural students, including via interviews with University of Pittsburgh students.