Claire Callender - Biography#

Professor Claire Callender completed her PhD in gender and social policy at the University of Wales in 1988. She holds joint professorships at two research-intensive London universities, University College London Institute of Education (Professor of Higher Education Studies since 2010) and Birkbeck, University of London (Professor of Higher Education Policy since 2008). She has been Deputy Director of the UK-based ESRC/RE Centre for Global Higher Education since 2015. She was previously Professor of Social Policy at London South Bank University, and worked in the UK Cabinet Office as Head of Research in the Women’s Unit, at the Policy Studies Institute, and the Universities of Sussex, Bradford, Leeds and University College Cardiff. She was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard and Fulbright Scholar in 2007. Her research, writing public work and policy advice focus on student finances in higher education, in the UK and across the world. She applies quantitative and qualitative sociological lenses to issues related to tuition loans, debt and their implications for, and impact on, access to and participation in higher education, and students’ post-graduation lives. She is also the foremost UK expert on part-time students. She has been commissioned to undertake research and/or invited to present evidence to OECD, the European Commission, government in Germany, Finland where she was appointed by the Ministry of Culture and Education to the peer review panel for the assessment of the Finnish Higher Education System (2015), Poland, and Malaysia; many Parliamentary Select Committees in UK, and all the major reviews of student funding in the UK since 1997 including the most recent, the Augar Report (2019). In 2017, she was awarded an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours list for services to higher education. Her contributions to scholarship include 82 books and reports, nearly all on policy-related topics, 29 peer reviewed papers and 44 book chapters.