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 six different streams: ‘Why it’s hard to make the finances add up’, ‘Equity, quality and affordability’, ‘Mobilities and inequalities’, ‘Freedoms and geopolitics’, ‘Governance and leadership and democracy’ and ‘Sustainability and reparative futures’.
The opening plenary of CGHE 2026, to be held in Wolfson College, 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.
The conference is organised around six thematic streams. Each theme brings together panels and papers that explore a shared set of questions. Explore themes to view all related sessions across the conference.
Theme 1: Why it’s hard to make the finances add up (Seminar Room A)
- Free tuition: Discourse vs realities
- When student loans work and when they don’t: Global comparisons of student loan policies
- Public and private funding and the future of higher education
- Unequal graduate outcomes: Reassessing the long-term returns to higher education
- Easy to say, hard to deliver: Why are student finance policies so sticky?
View more information in this theme.
Theme 2: Equity, quality and affordability (Seminar Room D)
- Measures of teaching quality: A legitimate guide for students and funders?
- Tertiary education, the risk society, the state, and access to tertiary education. What are students ‘buying’?
- Higher education equity in Latin America and the Caribbean: From system and institutional policies to intersectional student-centred approaches
- Marketisation vs. affordability: Challenges in the financing of higher education in India
- Sustainable academic partnerships for equity and social justice in HE in Palestine
View more information in this theme.
Theme 3: Mobilities and inequalities (Seminar Room E)
- Post-Brexit international student mobilities
- International student mobility and scholarships in a fractured world: Rethinking purposes, politics, and futures
- Researching transnational mobility and education: Opportunities, challenges and debates
- International education, migration, and international student journeys: UK and Australian perspectives
- Social mobility and equitable access to international higher education
View more information in this theme.
Theme 4: Universities, freedoms and geopolitics (Seminar Room G)
- Internationalisation of higher education beyond the western horizon: Critical perspectives
- Whose academic freedom? Threats in different contexts and against different stakeholders
- Higher education in liberal societies: Expansion, purposes, and accountability, past and future
- Higher education cooperation in the global south: Reframing influences on knowledge creation and sharing
- Anti-gender, diversity and the democratic university: Epistemic struggles and infrastructures (Online)
- China-Africa: Reflections on cultural exchange and educational collaboration (Seminar Room C)
View more information in this theme.
Theme 5: Governance, leadership and democracy (Library Discussion Room)
- After the university? Transformations of higher education governance in an era of global polycrisis
- University governance in a time of democratic decline: Student participation and the future of institutional structures in higher education
- Diversifying leadership in global higher education
- Talent attraction, retention and management: Comparative perspectives
View more information in this theme.
Theme 6: Sustainability and reparative futures (Seminar Room K)
- Concepts in contexts : A pluriversal perspective on equity policies of access to higher education
- Cross-national perspectives on climate and sustainability in higher education
- Grassroots educational initiatives for sustainability and equity in higher education
- Transforming the global education agenda: Beyond sustainability, toward plural futures
- Rethinking equity and the public good through service-learning and community engagement (SLCE) (Online)
Booking
For online participation, register here.
(Full price: £15, £10 for students, early career researchers, unemployed or based in an LMIC)
For in-person participation, register here.
(Full price: £50, £20 for students, early career researchers, unemployed or based in an LMIC)
F2F attendance will be limited to paying conference participants due to venue capacity.
* The Opening plenary, celebrating Claire’s work, will be a free and public event online.
If you have queries, contact Centre Director david.mills@education.ox.ac.uk.
Event Notes
Travel, access and accommodation
The Education Department is located in North Oxford, about 20 minutes walk from the train station, London bus stops, and the town centre. There is travel and access information here.
Hotels close to the Department include the Cotswold Lodge and the Linton Lodge. As it is the university vacation, you may also like to stay in a college room: check University rooms.
There is a café in the deparment that serves drinks and snacks. A light sandwich lunch will be provided both days. There are many restaurants in Oxford, including some close to the Department on North Parade.
The conference panels will be held in the Department, with six parallel streams of themed panels from which to choose.
The Conference Opening plenary, at 9.30-11 am on Thursday 23rd April, will be a tribute to Claire Callender’s work on student debt. This will be held at the Leonard Woolf theatre at Wolfson College, about 15 (pleasant) minutes walk from the department. Please let us know if you have mobility needs and we can organise transport back to the department.
The first afternoon of the conference there will be a research-policy roundtable on university financing in the Kellogg College hub, which is about 5 minutes walk from the department. The conference reception will be hosted at the Kellogg hub after the roundtable on the 23rd April, generously supported by Hang Seng University, Hong Kong. Drinks and canapés will be served.
Share this event
