Ines Lee and Eileen Tipoe have won the £15,000 Bracken Bower Prize with their proposal for a book about the future of higher education, Failing the Class.

The prize, first awarded in 2014 and supported by the Financial Times and McKinsey, goes to the best business book proposal by an author aged under 35. Lee and Tipoe’s proposal argues that higher education’s “supposed ‘trade-off’ between career and character development is artificial: it is possible and actually vital for universities to serve a dual purpose”.

Ines Lee is a Junior Research Fellow in Economics at the Faculty of Economics and Homerton College, while Eileen Tipoe is a senior lecturer in economics at Queen Mary University of London. They have a joint Keynes Fund sponsored project "Education and Attitude Polarization", which looks at how the division in public opinion on political and ideological issues, is wider between people with higher levels of education.