CGHE 2026: Navigating the equity crisis in global HE

CGHE 2026 will be held on April 23-24th. This is the centre’s eleventh annual conference, hosted by Oxford’s Department of Education. Building on the success of 2025, this will be fully hybrid, with 30 parallel panels and roundtables across five different streams: ‘Why it’s hard to make the finances add up’, ‘Mobilities and inequalities’, ‘Freedoms and geopolitics’, ‘Governance and leadership in a populist world’ and ‘Equity, sustainability and reparative futures’.

CGHE 2026 will celebrate the life and contributions of Professor Claire Callender, whose academic and policy interests helped prepare the ground for CGHE. Her groundbreaking work on student attitudes towards debt and its long-term consequences, along with her policy advocacy, are being taken forward by colleagues across CGHE’s international community.

A key focus for the conference is equity and sustainability. Across the world, governments are wrestling with how to fund the escalating costs of higher education. The global shift to knowledge-based economies, a focus on life-long learning, and the aspiration for universal tertiary education all put traditional models under strain. These new financial models have to balance a range of societal expectations: affordability, equitable access, high quality provision, flexibility and long-term sustainability.

Some countries, such as England, Canada and Australia, have chosen a high-tuition/high-aid funding model, often predicated on income-contingent student loans. Others, including much of Europe, have opted for low-tuition models to prioritise affordability, though there is also a growing private sector. Emerging economies in Africa, Latin America and Asia see rapid higher education expansion and differentiation, with fierce competition for the free or low-fee elite public universities, alongside growing tuition-charging private HE provision. Chile, South Africa, and the Philippines have recently implemented income-targeted free-tuition policies, highlighting the failings of previous systems. There is much to learn from these different models and the shared challenge of protecting the public good dimensions of higher education amidst constrained state finances.

Full details of the themed panels, along with registration links for F2F and online participation will be available in December 2025.

Registration fees:

* The Opening plenary, celebrating Claire’s work, will be a free and public event online.

F2F attendance will be limited to paying conference participants due to venue capacity.

If you have queries, contact Centre Director david.mills@education.ox.ac.uk.