Bristol or Southampton for English

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Dd has an offer for both, been to an offer holder day at both and is really struggling to make her mind up. Bristol is the higher offer with A* AA, Southampton offer is AAB.

Can anyone give some advice/info about either uni. Pros and Cons? Accomodation etc. just looking for some first hand experience of either uni. I know Bristol is very highly regarded for English but Dd seems to slightly favour the course content at Southampton.

Thanks for any insight you can offer.

I have a dd at Bristol if you have particular questions. Don't know about English as she isn't doing that subject (although I have been in the building & the facilities seem very good).

I also have a dd at Bristol. Not doing English I'm afraid. Mine is currently in her 4th year (Masters) and has loved everything about living in Bristol and the uni itself. Has your daughter been to both uni's open days? I imagine both will have post offer open days so she should attend both of those. Personally I think she would be mad not to firm Bristol and use Southampton as her insurance choice. But I am a little biased??

What about thinking about it this way: whichever university she goes to, she'll be fine. They're both excellent courses.

The conventional thing would be to put the higher offer as the Accepted, the lower offer as the Insurance choice.

Why not forbid her one course, & see what her reaction is? Or any of those other techniques for triggering the gut instinct.

But really, either university course will be fine ...

If she favours the course content in Southampton then that should be the main swayer, now she has to decide what other criteria she feels is important. Cost of accommodation for the second year, distance from halls to lectures, transport costs home, employability stats, % 1sts and 2:1 or anything else she feels important.

If she really is stuck then it makes sense to firm the higher offer and insure the lower

Bristol is considered a better Uni so she should go with that if she is thinking about employment after Uni.

Quite a few of my friends DCs have gone to Southampton and did well and had a great time. Both the Monte and Glen Eyre accommodation complexes are nice and easy walk to the uni. Subsequent years in fairly pleasant suburb of Portswood which seems to have become a bit of a student village.

They are all now amazingly in good jobs what with it being a very good RG uni. Most important thing is to get a 2.1 which is why going on the course you are most likely to do well on becomes more important than the uninformed out of date prejudices of a very few employers. There are so many factors in individual employability other than the general perceptions of uni rankings /reputation that it really should not be the major consideration.

As others have said gut feel, she will have an instinct about where she will be happiest and do best.

interested in Southampton. What is the Monte halls?

Thank you for all your replies, I'm really grateful for your time in replying.
She's going to have a long hard think about it over the Easter holiday and then make her choice and we will do the student finance.

Bristol is one of the leading universities which employers hold in high regard (my daughter went there). Southampton no matter what other mumsnetters tell you on the thread is not held in quite such high regard. i am not saying it's like the difference between Oxford and London Met but there really should be no question but that she picks Bristol for a whole raft of reasons.

seems to slightly favour the course content at Southampton.

Beware of this: is it a general thing or a few specific courses?
Courses that they are currently running can easily be dropped by the time you get there because the specific lecturer leaves for another University, takes a year out for a dept admin role, takes a sabbatical, goes on maternity leave, etc.

Mumsnetters love Bristol and often claim that a Bristol degree will take you places that an Exeter/Bath/Southampton degree doesn't. That may be true, due to historical prejudice that Bristol is better.

However, it is interesting to note that Bristol actually came 60th out of 90 submitting institutions for English in last year's research assessment (REF). While the REF scores should not be the main factor in deciding where to study as an undergraduate, such a score does suggest that Bristol's English department is not that spectacular. (REF scores shouldn't be taken that seriously as departments carefully optimised (fudged) their submissions but 60 out of 90 is pretty low.)

I agree however with the previous poster that one shouldn't choose based on small differences between courses or a few specific modules.

It is true. We have children getting jobs in the City and at places where recruiters know and have views. It is not just us saying Bristol is regarded highly. Now that might be wrong but it is a fact. In fact on her recruitment / interview/ test day at her job one of my daughters was the only one not from Oxbridge (she was had been at Bristol). People were saying how good it was. Now this might be men of 50 and 60 but they have a say, they own the place, they earn £2m a year... they are the people who may be hiring so why take a chance based on some new league table no one has read when you know the old certainties still tend to prevail?

Exeter traditionally was where you went if you weren't going to get into Oxbridge and also would not get into places like Bristol and Durham.

My DH and I work /worked in the city, both our organisations had professionally developed graduate recruitment processes designed to ensure we recruited the graduates best qualified for the job in terms of their personal qualities, experience, intellectual abilities etc. A 2.1 at least from a good university is only the starting point. They both had a long recruitment process comprising telephone interviewing and online psychometric testing, internships, a day long assessment process that gathered evidence that the graduate fitted a template of personal and intellectual qualities matched to what we had identified as being needed within the organisation, including multiple highly structured interviews, role plays, management exercises and further psychometric testing. Few organisations trust any one or four or six universities to have recruited the best candidates in terms of what they are looking for. The 50 year olds earning £2m a year have the sense to delegate the process to HR professionals, just as they would employ a recruitment consultant to search out candidates for senior level posts, and get on with running the business.

This is the way most decent graduate recruitment schemes work. Maybe Jilly's DD wondered into one particular organisation and found some Neanderthals who had not yet entered the 21st century (actually latter part of the 20th, since the process I was recruited by was very similar, I would really worry about the quality of the management of any organisation that was so unprofessional ) but I think it more likely Jilly does not appreciate the complexity of a well run recruitment process. One thing to politely compliment a graduate on their university, quite another to assume it is a short cut to getting the best candidates. I have interviewed candidates from Oxbridge who simply did not have what we were looking for in terms of the potential to become good managers. The most important thing is to equip yourself with a good degree, but understand that is just the starting point, and you also need lots of work experience, to have the personal qualities like motivation, maturity, interpersonal skills, and really think through what career you are suited to and how best to market yourself to employers, and be ready for the sheer slog of making effective applications . All the good universities I have visited with my DDs have careers offices that will help graduates develop their employability but fundamentally it is up to them.

The friend's DCs who went to Southampton have got jobs in city firms (law and finance ) the big 4 (management consultancy as well as tax and accounting) a very glamorous fashion business etc.

Top post, poisonwood -- I think too many people extrapolate from their own, or anecdotal experience. The singular of data is not anecdote.

I agree with everything Poisonwood said. My Dd had just been through the job application process and it is gruelling. Having said that, it can only be beneficial if you start the process from the BEST Uni you can get into. After that, it us up to you to demonstrate all the other qualities described in this post.

Graduates from Southampton get good jobs, as do graduates from other institutions. If the student is driven enough, they will make the most of the opportunities.

The most important thing, when weighing up two good offers, is for her to try and work out where she'd be happier. No point having perceived excellent graduate prospects if she spends three miserable years somewhere she doesn't like. If the only differentiating thing on enjoyment is the course, then let that be the choice.

And make sure the decision is hers, because if she hates where she goes you don't want it to be your fault!

Exeter traditionally was where you went if you weren't going to get into Oxbridge and also would not get into places like Bristol and Durham.

This has never been true for STEM: Exeter has never been strong in those areas.

Both good courses but she should follow her own inclination, I think.

Thanks again everyone.

Can anyone explain how the university rankings work.? I've just looked at the university league tables for a comparison and overall Bristol is 18th and Sothampton 16th. For English specifically, Bristol is 5th and Southampton 29th.
However, looking at the Guardian rankings, overall Southampton is 19th and Bristol 34th. For English and Creative writing, Southampton is 10th and Bristol 21st.

The rankings just don't make sense to me at how they differ.

I completely agree that it should be her decision and it definitely will be. I want her to go where she wants to go and I really don't mind either way. To be honest, Southampton is the easier of the two for us to get to but a few people have said Bristol would be a better overall uni experience.

Which university league tables? Most are put together by journalists for the Guardian and the Times Higher. And they should have explanations about what's in them, and how different factors are weighted. The Guardian one can be read in all sorts of ways, depending on how you order the criteria.

Then there are the HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for England) league tables for student satisfaction -- the NSS (a very very badly constructed questionnaire which my Statistics colleagues say gives very little reliable data, but there you go, it's driven by Government policy, not the desire for good information) and the Research Excellence Framework (the REF).

This has never been true for STEM: Exeter has never been strong in those areas

Although it now has a medical school, doesn't it? Which might imply a strong beefing up of STEM? Said rather ruefully, as my experience of teaching Humanities at universities with Medical schools is that they suck all the resources - I imagine it's worse now as £9k hardly touches the sides of the cost of a med student.

It can also be worth looking at which universities people went to who in the last 5 years have been recruited by particular organisations if you can find that if your child is after working for one of those organisations Eg you could do the exercise looking at some good barrister chambers looking at newly taken on barristers and see which universities figure highest.

Exeter has substantial recruitment problems in STEM. It is certainly not top 10 and is struggling to retain its position.

I think the fashion amongst vice-chancellors is to add business schools, medical schools or whatever is perceived to be missing, to up positions in tables. Any new school (medical, business, whatever) sucks up resources and in practice harms all existing schools on campus, so I don't think a new medical school helps the rest of STEM.

I thought this was about English but as usual with these threads it has got stuck on STEM subjects.
From my viewpoint (Exeter Alumna fwiw) the OP's daughter should choose the place and course she likes best and if it is Soton rather than Bristol she's hardly going to a bottom ranked university.
One reason why Exeter might not be great for STEM is that the current VC shamefully closed the Chemistry Department with little notice back in the early 2000s ostensibly because it wasn't getting good enough RAE ratings. The Peninsula Medical School is split between two universities (Exeter and Plymouth).

I think the offer from Bristol tells you that their course is more difficult to get onto. Lecturers and topics change so that should not be a deciding factor. If your DD loves Southampton and does not want the challenge of trying to get the higher grades, then she should opt for Southampton. If she likes Bristol and what is on offer in Bristol, then put them as firm and Southampton as insurance. As it is an English degree, Employers may not be too fussed anyway as other issues such as work experience, the obligatory 2:1 and her personality, drive and enthusiasm will be important too. Lots of employers do know which courses are more difficult to get onto though.