How important would a Russell Group uni be to your employer?

[paygride]

I work for a well known global company, employs about 2000 in UK. I was speaking to someone from our People team about how important it is for a candidate to have attended a Russell Group unti and she said it wasn't something that was especially relevant when they were looking at CVs and a few young people have joined our team recently and only one of them attended a RG uni (she did go to Cambridge). I spoke to DH about this and he works for another global company (totally different sector) and he said it's not something he looks for when he's been recruiting either. What they both said is they were bothing looking for 'something extra' (well my People officer actually described it as a 'sprinkling of fairy dust'.)

By contrast I worked for a Consultancy firm in the city and they pretty much only recruited people from Oxbridge, much smaller firm and pretty much all their business was UK based, huhe salaries and huge bonuses (which defintely isn't across the board where I work but lots very senior of people on high salaries).

DS is going to be applying to Unis and is fixed on the idea of a RG uni even though some non RG unis (Lancaster & Leicester) seem to be offering much more interesting courses in his chosen field but he will only apply to the RG unis.

Interested to know what others think. .

I’m an OT. No one cares what uni you attended or even what grade you received. I nearly died getting a first and no one cares.

it’s more important the experience you’ve had since you’ve been qualified and how you sell yourself at interview.

Apparently the graduate management training course at Aldi pays £50k!

My anecdata on that is the drs who went to oxbridge are the least likely to be practising in their 40s.

Being that perfectionist and working to be "the best" at everything you do is not always the best basis for working in a world where there aren't necessarily right answers and sometimes you will inevitably get things wrong. I have a number of friends of this background who could not cope in medicine and are now doing all sorts of completely different things, mostly floaty and creative, low paid and zero pressure.

My data sample is pretty small - single figures. But I imagine yours is too.

@FingleGlen that's interesting. Dd1 is an Oxbridge educated doctor (almost 34). I'll have to ask about what her peers are doing. She is not the least bit a perfectionist and is so laid back she is almost horizontal! Dd2 is though (also Oxbridge but an engineer). Dd1 loves her work - gynaecologist/obstetric surgeon.

@RainbowBagels I didn’t say non grads were working at McDonslds. You’ve nailed it though - they earn what a lot of grads do but haven’t got a degree or a loan.

Im obviously aware most engineering grads should start on more but in some areas the median is £32,000 so some are not raking it in but they should have decent prospects.

its also clear that many jobs don’t need a grad and therefore the employer doesn’t offer grad training!!! Why would they? A friends DS prepares and analyses questionnaires. Started on £25,000 in London! Another has a first in Env Science. Works for nhs in data entry - grade 2. No doubt there’s promotion but that’s a school leaver job. The over supply of grads is pushing out others who would be more than ok for the jobs.

As for law - nearly 30,000 law grads pa. Some are overseas and are not seeking work but we have around 1/4 of that number of training places for solicitors and barristers and any academic grad is considered. It’s a vast oversupply but of course there are other jobs. However we do churn out grads in the arts without any thought to employment. It’s expensive and needs revision.

I agree it needs revision but IMO that needs to start at employer level. They need to invest far more in training for young people. The reason the L7 apprentices were discontinued was because employers were using them to get already trained staff with degrees their MBA's or whatever, not bringing on young people at the lower levels. I know its difficult for employers but they don't want to spend the time training young people, so they employ graduates who have already done some learning in the subject into posts that could and should, with some on the job training, be non graduate employment. Young people know this so they go onto degrees. They see non grad jobs advertised going to grads so they then feel they have no choice but to go to University. They cannot find apprenticeships at L4. The ones there are are extremely difficult to get onto and they often can't find work either because employers may advertise jobs requiring A Levels but often they will not give that job to someone with 3 A Levels over a new graduate. That creates a vicious circle of people looking at the jobs market at the time they are applying and making individual choices to go to University, creating an oversupply of grads ( although we are about average in relation to the proportion of grads per head of population among developed nations). Lots of creative arts jobs require a degree because there is a large element of freelance work in the industry, so they want people who have learnt the basics of that job that they can then hire on a freelance basis (for example, games design, a huge growth industry where we are on of the world leaders doesn't have a non graduate route unless you are a self starter). They haven't got the time or resources to train people up. Yet it is one of the largest growth industries in the UK, and brings in billions. Also, Universities are businesses. Arts courses are subsidising the far more expensive STEM courses. Students wanting to study STEM will have to pay far more for their degree without arts students. It wont be arts courses that will be closed down if Universities didnt offer History degrees for example. It will be the far more expensive engineering courses. Arguably, the courses that shouldn't be taught at University are the ones that are largely vocational- engineering, law, accountancy etc, because they are better delivered in industry, with a day release to University to do the degree (a L4 apprenticeship) but by and large, employers don't want to do that (otherwise they would have been doing it on a much larger scale already) or they cant do it so prefer to outsource to Universities on the whole.
The McDonald's graduate training scheme starts at £25k. The equivalent or below apprenticeship scheme may start at the apprenticeship wage, which is below minimum wage. Although McDonald's is a pretty good employer so they will probably pay minimum wage.
@TizerorFizz what would be your ideal post 18 system? Thinking about people who are not in the top 5% of earners as well?

Also sorry to add to my rant ( I have no skin in the game- I just like films and telly!) if we don't have creative arts courses at University we will end up with a creative Arts Industry (again, one of the few growth industries in the UK) dominated even more than we do now by nepo babies and people from very wealthy families, because they will be the ones who could afford to send their children to drama school/art school and get their children a foot in the door of those industries. Going to University give young people access to those industries and a chance of gaining work experience/ access to agents etc that they would otherwise not have. Grads may come out of University with a debt but it is more or less a graduate tax. There is no way they would be able to risk that money to gain access to that industry without it.

@RainbowBagels You think a degree opens up jobs in these fields? Not as much as it should because so many arts based jobs and fashion jobs are who you know. Not what you know. Mum and Dad and contacts are totally instrumental in it. We pay for these degrees as alumni don’t pay much back. Do we think they are value for money? For student or the country? I don’t believe they all are but of course some should be retained.

So my main issue is that too many places on arts degrees are available. I didn’t say people should not train! If the apprentice scheme isn’t big enough, it’s because employers get their pick of graduates, of whom there are vast numbers.

Many employers pay the apprentice levy but it’s another tax. Plenty were training young people before that. DH’s company did - to Chartered Engineer status. MEng is the starting point. It’s a fairly expensive thing for a company to do. However we have many graduate jobs with no professional career goals at all and they don’t need grads to do them. I would like to see these jobs going to school leavers and be apprenticeships but the end goal must be qualifications but not necessarily a degree.

Therefore I’m not happy with around 20% of degrees where grad earnings are poor and dc do not get suitable grad work. Some years ago the IFS identified these areas of study and some should be diplomas or HND/C level. It’s unpalateable because unis won’t disappear or contract but the old colleges of HE really should never have become universities. They should have continued to offer professional and vocational training. Did any of their previous alumni suffer from going to these colleges? I doubt it. Many were very employable and we need a more structured approach to matching young people to work because we don’t have endless media or Musial theatre work.

The apprenticeship levy is not supposed to be a tax. It is supposed to be used as a fund for training apprentices. The reason many businesses use it as a tax is because they don't want to use it for apprenticeships.
The IFS report was from 2019 (before the repayment changes) grad courses on a purely financial basis (mainly IIRC creative arts, theology and English) were not financially worth it but they were looking firstly, across the sector, including RG and were looking at them purely on a financial basis. So creative arts we have spoken about, but obviously if you are studying theology you want to go into some kind of mission. You aren't going to be making £££ but it is a course that is valuable to society as a whole. English again, is the study of our national language and has cultural capital. Arts courses are subsidising STEM courses, so actually for the taxpayer, the arts students are paying over the odds for courses whilst STEM students are paying under. The findings are that university is an overall gain for the taxpayer.
The IFS study also didn't talk about institutions, they talked about courses- so including people who went to RG and did creative arts courses.
I agree that there are some low quality institutions and we should have more vocational training in the form of HND/C and courses where people don't leave home. But the 2 lowest ranking uni's used to be polytechnics and offered degrees in the same way as they do now, pre 1992.
In any case, I agree with you that there is an oversupply sometimes of universities and courses that are not financially viable as institutions, especially as we are going to see a dramatic drop in the young population in the not too distant future, but my original point was that on these threads the tone is that anything below RG and anything but a STEM degree is worthless. That is an entirely different thing from saying that some courses are not graduate level professions. It's dismissing most students degrees as worthless when they are not.

From my experience interviewing grads for our graduate scheme I’d happily take an OU graduate who has had to work alongside studying. They generally are self starters and organised, and I think are better able to cope with work pressures. I know there used to be a lot of snobbery about the OU but it takes quite a lot of dedication to settle down to study after a day at work, fitting around family etc.
Hopefully though more and more companies will interview blind to get round biases.

https://observer.co.uk/news/business/article/big-four-cut-jobs-for-graduates-as-ai-adds-to-consulting-crisis

Less graduate roles at the Big 4 - same across legal firms

What are your thoughts on post grads who worked for a couple of years between undergraduate and post grad in a role that is relevant to the masters degree?

@TizerorFizz are you in a univeristy

We did take on a more mature grad who did that, combined a masters degree with working in a related area and being a mum of 4. She’s done extremely well.

I actually prefer candidates who’ve done this. We get quite a few candidates with MBAs and the ones who did their MBA straight after their undergrad degree get a lot less value from the MBA compared to those who worked and then applied some of their work experiences during their MBA.

@IthasYes No. why?