Nicholas Barr, fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, is professor of public economics at the London School of Economics. Since the mid-1980s he has been active in the debate about financing higher education, advocating a system of income-contingent student loans collected alongside income tax or social security contributions. In the UK, he argued for many years for tuition fees fully covered by income-contingent loans, and he and his colleague Iain Crawford have been described as the architects of the 1998 and 2006 reforms in England. Barr led the team that designed the student loan system in Hungary and has advised governments in Australia, New Zealand and Chile.
He is the author of numerous articles, and author or editor of over twenty books, including Financing Higher Education: Answers from the UK (with Iain Crawford), (2005). He is a member of the Editorial Board of the International Social Security Review and an Associate Editor of CESifo Economic Studies, the Australian Economic Review and the Journal of the Economics of Ageing.
Alongside teaching and research is wide-ranging involvement in policy. He has spent periods of leave at the World Bank, working on the post-communist transition countries, and at the IMF. He is also involved in pension policy and has advised the governments of China and Chile on pension reform, as well as governments in the UK, Finland, Sweden and South Africa (where he also contributed to the Lund Committee on Child and Family Support).
Barr has an MSc in economics from the London School of Economics and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a Fulbright Scholar.
Nicholas Barr's Website
Lorraine Dearden is a professor of economics and social statistics at University College London and research fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, where she has focused on college/higher education finance in the UK for the last 15 years. Her research also covers other important issues such as widening access to higher education, the effect of student aid on college participation and the returns to college education in both the UK and Australia.
Dearden conducts research on a range of issues, including the impact of education and training on labor market outcomes and company performance; evaluation of education and labor market policies; conditional cash transfers for school students; the evaluation of childcare, home learning environment and early years policies on children's and parents' outcomes; the determinants and impact of early childhood adversity; ethnic inequality and discrimination; the determinants of the demand for different types of schooling; intergenerational income and education mobility; and program evaluation issues and methods.
Dearden is part of the leadership team of the Administrative Data Research Centre – England, which is currently advocating and facilitating linkage of government administrative data sets to enhance public policy making. This includes an innovative project analyzing student loan data which has been linked to government earnings and tax records.
She is a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and an IZA fellow. She has studied at University College London, the London School of Economics and Australian National University.
Lorraine Dearden's Websites
Bruce Chapman is director, policy impact at the Australian National University’s Crawford School of Public Policy. Chapman received his bachelor degree (First Class Honors) from the Australian National University and PhD from Yale University.
He has consulted extensively on higher education policy, including developing the motivation and design of Australia’s Higher Education Contribution Scheme (the first national income contingent loan scheme using the income tax system for collection) in 1989. Over the past two decades he has served as a higher education financing consultant to the World Bank and the governments of Thailand, Papua New Guinea, Mexico, Canada, the UK, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Malaysia, Colombia, the US, Chile and China; as a consultant to the Bradley Review of Australian Higher Education on student income support; and as a consultant to the Australian Government’s Base Funding Review. Chapman also served as a senior economic advisor to Prime Minister Paul Keating.
Chapman has published over 200 papers on a range of issues, including income contingent loans, long-term unemployment, the meaning of job flows data, the economics of crime, the economics of cricket, fertility, marital separation and government as risk manager. Over the last several years he has convened conferences and written extensively on the application of income contingent loans to a host of social and economic reform issues.
He was elected to the Academy of the Social Sciences of Australia in 1993, received an Order of Australia in 2003 for contributions to economic policy, and was elected president of the Australian Society of Labour Economics (2004-07) and president of the Economics Society of Australia (2007-13). He was made distinguished fellow of the Economics Society of Australia in 2015.
Bruce Chapman's Website
Christina Forsberg is acting director general of CSN and has overall responsibility for Swedish financial aid for students. CSN pays more than SEK 30bln (US$3.6bln) a year in financial aid and administers student loans of around SEK 200bln (US$24bnl). She joined CSN in 2015, initially as director of the Department of Payment, overseeing payments of student aid and study allowance. She was appointed acting director general the same year.
Christina Forsberg is a qualified lawyer with a long career in Swedish public administration. She started as senior enforcement officer (1995-2000) at the Swedish Enforcement Authority and oversaw the development of the legal work in Gävleborg County. She was subsequently promoted to various management positions, including enforcement director in Gävle (2000-2005), regional enforcement director in Eskilstuna (2005-2006) and head of the Regional Enforcement Department in Eastern Sweden (2006-2008).
In 2008 the Swedish Government appointed Forsberg as county police commissioner in Gävleborg. She led 600 employees and during her tenure (2008-2014) conducted a comprehensive cultural overhaul within the police authority to actively involve personnel in day-to-day activities. The results included increased confidence among victims of crime, improved service for the general public, fewer young people suspected of crime and less violence in public environments.
For her work at the police authority, Christina Forsberg was awarded the Leader of the Year (Årets Chef) accolade in 2015 by Swedish management and business magazine Chef. Since then she has been frequently engaged to speak on the topic of leadership. In 2016 she was voted one of Sweden’s 150 “super communicators” by Resumé trade magazine.
Christina Forsberg's Website
Achim Meyer auf der Heyde is the secretary general of the German National Association for Student Affairs (Deutsches Studentenwerk / DSW), where he previously served as a member of its International Advisory Board.
Achim Meyer auf der Heyde is also president of the International Association of Student Affairs and Services, vice president of the European Council for Student Affairs and member of the board of governors at the University of Wuppertal.
He previously served as general director in the Ministry for Education and Sports, Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg (1995-2003), where he was responsible for vocational training, professional schools and further education. As founder and director of the BBJ Company (1985-1995), he consulted for the National and Federal State Ministries, the European Commission, local and regional authorities, trade unions and employer associations in the fields of professional education, labor market policy, social and youth policy and European financial support. Between 1980 and April 1985 he was the managing director of the Vocational Training Company Kreuzberg in Berlin.
Achim Meyer auf der Heyde holds degrees in economics, business administration and education.
Achim Myer auf der Heyde's Website