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. .

@TizerorFizz I've just looked it up. 14% went to Oxbridge, so disproportionate, but that does mean that 86% went to other unis.

@Blinkingbother ? So going to LSE, Imperial or Oxbridge is not an achievement? Of course it is! QMUL or Newcastle not quite so much. However there’s a reason why grads from some unis are over represented - they tick more boxes.

You don’t get anywhere with “social connections”. No one is recruiting based on this. You get a job because you meet requirements.

Unfortunately some people think a degree is enough and don’t do much else. Often disadvantaged dc don’t aim high or step up into suitable roles or apply for internships. They are happy to stay local. Most people don’t have connections but their dc do well because they aim high for work and don’t go to the local lowly ranked uni. They value themselves more than that if they have good A level grades. It’s all about knowing your worth and confidence. Plus do some work or volunteering and be interesting! Have something to say. Know about the company you want to work for.

I am wondering now if I have got it wrong and whether it's simply that candidates from those unis got through three rounds of punishing interviews and tasks.

Regardless, no young person can afford to decline a job in 2025.

Very encouraging to see so many employers interview blind. Hopefully this thread is representative of employers wide.

I’m in a big and we do similar, at least for initial screening. Its nothing to do with data protection. We used to recruit almost entirely from Oxbridge and a subset of RGs but you end up with a very narrow pool of talent from which to select candidates. However 20 years ago we also still had university attended on the short profiles supplied to clients - again no longer relevant in the modern job market.

We don’t care which university was attended. For exp hire we still get candidates who did not attend university but qualified through other routes. For graduates any differentiator in form of regular work, volunteering and team/communicating activity is useful

Where we are interested in a specific institution it will be because of relevant teaching/courses. The institutes which correlate well with later career success are by no means all RG and Oxbridge.

What does DS want to study? It makes quite a difference.

@NanFlandersYes I agree plenty of very bright dc are not getting to Oxbridge. There are some great candidates out there but Oxbridge still punches through. How many from Bucks New or Northampton? How many non RG /RG plus? I bet that’s fairly low out of the 86%. I would be interested to know because civil service not knowing uni still leads to unequal success. It’s changing nothing I suspect. Happy to be wrong.

I think things are changing pretty fast in this respect. Three years ago, my own company (tacitly) specified Oxbridge and Russell Group only (plus Bath & St A) at the 'CV sifting' stage of the recruitment procedure. We now consider any university at all - and I would say are on the cusp of being prepared to consider non-graduates, so long as they can demonstrate the same level of skill.

I'm not entirely sure what's driven this rapid change, but one factor seems to be the dawning realisation that with so many more people going to university, there are reasonable candidates coming out of a huge range of universities. While some schools and social backgrounds value Oxbridge and RG above all other options, many students simply go to universities that are local to them, or where they liked the 'vibe', and come out with very good skills. When my company recruited entirely from Oxbridge and RG, we ended up with a big block of young graduates from Exeter and Edinburgh - all of them pretty similar people. As someone pointed out above, this didn't help our diversity of thinking and approach. We are doing much better with a much wider mix.

Another factor is that the old certainties no longer apply. I went to uni 30 years ago and I know in what order I'd rank, say, Lancaster, St Andrews and Loughborough. Recent graduates would rank them differently. And those more recent graduates are, bit by bit, becoming more senior and are themselves recruiting, bringing their own views/biases to bear. If you yourself went to, say, UEA, and have done well, you're unlikely to be convinced that you should avoid hiring people from there just because it's not RG.

I also agree that most people would struggle to confidently identify a RG from a non-RG uni in a lot of cases.

Oxbridge candidates are also disproportionately likely to have a public school background with the self confident communication style which goes down will in the civil service at the in person interview rounds.

We also have graduates like this - most of them go into our public sector aligned practice where they conform nicely to the expectations of the senior civil service clients! Even Cap Markets these days doesn’t care much about background but the public sector can be very sniffy still.

Overall in 2024, Civil Service fast stream offered jobs to 1.1% of non RG applicants. Oxbridge 7.2% and RG without Oxbridge, 3.4%. So it’s overwhelmingly RG. This is fairly typical of well paid careers. So not knowing uni doesn’t change much!

I genuinely don't understand the fixation on RG? Are people just using it to mean 'decent university' without actually understanding the term?

Anecdotally in my last role we recruited blind and ended up with three trainees (law) - one from Oxford who was great, one from Cambridge who was truly shit (I don't say this lightly, they really were) and one from the University of Bedfordshire who was outstanding. The latter had gone to that uni as she had caring duties at home and it was the closest to her. Based on that and various other experiences in my working life I'd never judge based on university (and I'm an RG grad!)

@C8H10N4O2That is not true for recent Oxbridge recruits. 75% state educated now. 11.2% of CS fast stream applicants were paying fees at a private school. That’s probably below 6th form independent school enrolments. 3.4% independent but on a busary. So well below Oxbridge independent % of 25%. It’s not as if independently educated dc don’t go to Durham or Exeter! They are not all at Oxbridge.

@TizerorFizz Thanks for that. Could you post the source? I'm surprised (as a non RG senior civil service manager) that the ratios are that skewed. The brightest fast streamer I ever worked with went to Manchester Met. I'd expect some skew - RGs and Oxbridge will have a higher proportion of high scoring A level candidates after all - and @C8H10N4O2 I totally take your point about the confidence advantage of a public school - but I'm shocked it's so stark.

I work for a tech start up and 2:1 degree essential but they couln't care which uni, and I say that as someone with 2 RG degrees. Ceratin streams the degree type is essential eg Computer Science but any university degree.

@AndoutcomethewolvesYour recruitment processes must be pants if you chose a useless Cambridge grad. Useless in what way? Not the right personality? Could not pass exams? Not good with clients? Slow? Surely the young person passed your tests and interviews so why was their uselessness not picked up? You do get RG fixation - you chose 2/3 Oxbridge! I would be very wary of your recruitment processes as they seem questionable if 1/3 was poor.

I don't look at the university people went to when recruiting.

It's naive to think you don't get a job with social connections. I have seen hundreds of well connected young undergrads that were mediocre at best land top jobs because their uncle or cousin runs whatever division of somewhere. It's very disheartening to be honest but I think it's unwise to pretend we are a meritocracy.

Completely irrelevant.

My dd has chosen a non RG university because in the industry she wants to go into certain non RG's are more highly thought of.

Any work experience. We don’t expect a graduate to necessarily have work experience related to the job, but anything they can show such as internships, a Saturday or holiday job will show responsibility and their ability to do a job.

Yes and this isn’t because they are Russell group. It’s because they are considered wrongly or rightly to have the top performers.

Was involved in recruiting both in civil service and private sector. Didn't care about which university, but did care about its reputation for the particular subject area of the degree - that was what mattered.

What about the contacts people make in a RG uni? All the people they meet, etc? I can't understand why someone would go elsewhere if they had the opportunity to go to a uni that will open many doors.

I heard someone say that a lot of companies blind CVs for that information. I don’t know how true it is though.

DS will be applying this year and he plans to try and go to the best place he can for his subject. It’s not always the university’s you might think. I think the atmosphere of the place is also very important.

When you start Uni, do you know what career you want and how would you know at application stage what contacts you might make?

The Russell Group have performed a masterful act of making people think it means something to be RG.

you aren’t meeting a shed load of contacts. The students get just as off their faces at night and are just normal people.

True enough. However, if you are going into finance or consulting, it seems to me that the top 5 'magnet unis' make a difference.