Guy lied about which university he went to

@Snoopy104 if it's a lie, it DID come from a bad place and you should be wary. Someone who lies about something so insignificant has serious insecurities and you don't want to be dealing with them down the line.

How do you know (for certain) that he lied?

It reminds me of an d acquaintance who told me her daughter was at Cambridge University. I said how fabulous etc (as it was/is) and asked which college and she looked at me like I’d asked the most stupid question.

I later hear she was at AR and had been telling everyone she was ‘at Cambridge’.

I knew someone who really was a bit barking I think. A friend of a relative. She'd done a two week secretarial course at a college in Oxford, but her story grew arms and legs and within a few years she was claiming she'd been at Oxford university and was friends with David Cameron et al.

@Snoopy104 You could give him the benefit of the doubt and think that he's just wanting to make the best impression possible, he likes you, and he's a bit nervous. He may settle down, become more comfortable, and this will be a thing that you can laugh about.

OR it may be that he repeatedly and consistently twists the truth for whatever reason, you (understandably) don't like it, and you go your separate ways.

@Snoopy104 have you asked to see his degree certificate to clear this up?

Are you 100% sure they lied? The whole scenario seems quite vague. Can you check what they put on LinkedIn or Facebook or what their uni friends have put?

@Snoopy104 out of curiosity how old are you?
You said he went to university 5 years ago - so are you both in your 20s?
If so all this talk of "polys" is odd - because they are literally before your time.
To be honest you clearly don't trust him and you possibly don't have much in common (you like gigs, he doesn't) - so why are you with him?
If you don't trust him it's time to end the relationship.

He clearly wanted to impress you. It isn't a red flag for me. It depends what vibe you got from him. But if you feel uncomfortable then consider whether you're just looking for a reason not to date him, your intuition is picking up on something, or for you it's particularly important to be black and white on such details.

Its not the specifics of the lie that are the problem, its the underlying inferiority complex its covering up. You might find it overwhelming after a time, when you realise you can't trust 80% of what they say, they can't bear to be shown up and they seem to constantly assume the worst of others.

Urgh this reminds me of one of my worst job interviews ever

she asked where I got my degree and I said where I had studied.

she picked up a copy of my certificate and waved it at me and said that’s not what it says on here, with this stupid smug look on her face

The way she said It provoked such a rush of anger in me , I had to take a deep breath before I explained where I had attended classes , who ran the course, and the university that validated the course was three different places.

she pulled a face and said it was a very unusual set up and she would have to look into it!

stupid thing was I didn’t actually need a degree to do the job , she just wanted to show she was a clever dick In front of her co workers .

I hope she steps on Lego in bair feet 🦶

if you don’t like what you have heard- move on . Don’t make him out to be a liar if you’re not 100% . There might well be a good reason/ maybe you don’t actually know everything about every aspect of each university in the country 🤷‍♀️

@DreamTheMoors what's California got to do with this - in the UK they haven't existed for 30 years 🙄
This is a UK site and the OP appears to be in the UK.
The OP said he left university 5 years ago so a long long time since Polytechnics existed. If he left at the regular age (21) that would mean he is 26 now. He wouldn't have even been born when the polys became universities so why would he pretend he went to a "proper" uni rather than a poly? I doubt many 26 year olds have even heard of them.

I went to Oxford university……in so much as I was a tourist and went on a walking tour which happened to briefly take us through the grounds of one of the colleges. Does that count?

Other than that, I now feel really inferior as I didn’t go to university! 😁

My friend was very lucky in that for her year and the last year as it turned out for her PGCE she attended Brookes but the actual certificate says University of Oxford.

@NewFriendlyLadybird ahhhh this reminds me of my favourite Brookes story. Very uppity colleague kept telling people she went to Oxford. She was innocently asked by someone else which college (the second person only had a little familiarity with the names and was quite naive). Uppity colleague responds "Brookes" and carries on the conversation as if it's one of the colleges. I look Uppity dead in the eye and say "Oh that's nice. I never managed to see Brookes properly when I went to Balliol, I think it's one of the more modern ones" and watch her flush and change the subject.

Lying about your academic credentials isn't great, it suggests insecurity as well as the ability to fictionalize your life. Neither are attractive traits.

I wouldn't hold it completely against him. I think it's a small adjustment. If he'd lied about going to uni at all, that's a red flag. Indicating the uni instead of poly isn't a huge deal. Maybe he was mocked for it back in the day and it still rankles, we all have our insecurities which we like to gloss over a little.

@DreamTheMoors

America? Wtf are you talking about

My mate used to tell people her friends (3 of us) were students at college. For me it was fine, I went to King's College, London uni but for our other friends it didn't quite work - one was at Cardiff uni and the other at Leeds Uni. She said she told people that so they didn't think we were snobs!

Some guys came talking to us - they were at UMIST so I was merrily chatting about living in Chelsea and he said, I though you were at college and I said, I am, I'm at Kings College. They thought we were being funny when it wasn't ever us 3 who said anything about where we were studying, we just used the term student to describe ourselves.

Anyways, the moral is that it frankly doesn't matter, does it? He has a degree, you have a degree etc, so all things are equal, right?

What is a red flag is one of my relatives via marriage has a painted portrait in cap and gowns when she's not even a graduate. She says, well I went to college and if I was in the USA I would have graduated.... wtaf!

Of course, but we all know what the OP meant. Nowadays they are called post '92 institutions, but you don't have to be over 50 to know what a Polytechnic was. That said, I have zero snobbery against these institutions, it is the lying that would put me off rather than the fact that someone went to a post '92.

To make it worse....girlfriends parents had met at Cambridge so there would have been lots of similarities with his experience at Oxford. Instead of changing the subject he spoke for an hour about what he had read,where he had lived, his tutors, well known people who were there at the same time. He had researched it all. It was cobblers, absolute cobblers.

Wow. Somebody should tell Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, California.

If he’s trying to pass off Oxford Brookes as Oxford, Anglia Ruskin as Cambridge etc then I’d be unimpressed as it suggests a level
of insecurity and pretension I’m not not interested in having to deal with.

I have no skin in the game - no degree, flunked out/dropped out - just don’t like the lies.