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

Abstract

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.