Edinburgh Uni vs Durham Uni

[Anteater]

Last time I posted was before Dx was born!!
fast forward 18 years and DD has been offered place at Durham in South College (DD not impressed) but also has an offer from Edinburgh (which she is warming to) D day to make decision by is this Thursday - anybody have any words of wisdom??
I went to Sussex so have no idea what to recommend !

@Xenia

World rankings re Durham are utterly bizarre. The international recruiters are idiots if they believe such rubbish! I have a sneaking suspicion they don’t. Or maybe Durham grads make their £ millions here!

But Xenia this is 2022 - not 1982.

Graduates who remain in England are now in competition with graduates across the globe. Recruitment strategies in the top organisations are increasingly global as remote working means that location is no longer the deciding factor for many organisations.

The international recruiters are idiots if they believe such rubbish!

What Rubbish? That Edinburgh University is highly ranked and well regarded?

I went to Durham myself and, while it's well known in England, most European and North American companies do not target their graduates. Edinburgh is definitely better known and respected globally.

But they're both great Unis!

I can't speak for international recruitment, which may well use ranking tables, but I suspect many of the people recruiting for U.K. firms have their own views on the best universities, rather than consulting rankings. Inevitably with some bias from their own experiences.

It's a marginal argument in any case. Both are excellent universities with good reputations.

Going to a Scottish university didn't really cross my mind but they're quite popular at my sons' (English) school. My older son put Durham as his first choice this year but my younger son wants to look round Edinburgh and St As. That said, Edinburgh and St As took even longer than Durham to issue offers this year which made for quite a bit of stress as the acceptance deadline loomed.

DD graduated from Durham a couple of years ago (maths) and all of her friends got jobs quickly. Faster than DS and his friends, who went to Cambridge! In fact I'd say they're very desirable for employers.
Durham may be small and quiet but the college set up means there's always something happening. albeit student led. But that also means theres plenty of opportunity for students to get involved and beef up their CVs.
DD had various issues sparked by her ED at Durham, and her college were great at dealing with her.
Don't worry about being a Hill College. No where is far away. And the facilities at a new college will be nicer.
That said there's what DD described as a 'rapey' culture at Durham, centred around the sports clubs. Sounded icky to say the least. Awful. But maybe that's the case everywhere.
Can't comment about Edinburgh. I know nothing.

High Flyers Research has produced the independent assessment of the graduate job market for the past seventeen years.

Edinburgh is included in the list of top ten universities targeted by employers in 2021-2022. Durham isn't but I would suspect that it is just outside the top ten.

Interesting reading @NoraBattysCurlers . Manchester in top spot , Nottingham 2nd and Bristol 3rd
Edinburgh 9th and Durham 13th

www.highfliers.co.uk/download/2022/graduate_market/GM22-report.pdf

That's an interesting report. Every one I read had different rankings or ratings for unis. I do think you can read into things whatever you want.

That's an interesting report. Pleased to see Glasgow in the top 20. I'm always rather frustrated that English school students focus so much on Edinburgh and St. Andrews - there are other universities in Scotland. !

Given Scotland's much more cautious approach to the Covid pandemic, when comparing an English and a Scottish university, I would be looking very closely at actual student experience this year in terms of face to face lectures / seminars / field trips / tutorials.

In considering whether this will continue, I would compare what these universities SAID they would do for the 21-22 academic year vs actual student experience, and then extrapolate that to compare what is being said about 22-23 vs what might actually happen.

My DCs are really lucky, in that they are doing courses that, because of their extremely practical content, have very largely been face to face outside formal lockdown periods. However, I know that they have peers doing other courses at both English and Scottish universities who have still had minimal or no face to face teaching despite ambitious promises at the start of the year. It really is highly course as well as university dependent, so if you can find a Geography student from each university to talk about their personal experience, so much the better.

@blue421 Can't remember which thread but I would get your DS2 to look at the odds of getting into a Scottish university from an English school if he decides he may like to apply to both. Depending on the subject there is a case it's a high risk option. DS was rejected this year by St A (fair enough) and it came to light that on paper he would have had better odds for getting into Cambridge. Hopefully he may cross paths with your DS1 as he has firmed Durham too!

Those odds can happen between English universities too tho
DS got rejected by Durham but accepted by Cambridge!

Very interesting report @NoraBattysCurlers

• The ten universities targeted by the largest number of top graduate employers in 2021-2022 are Manchester, Nottingham, Bristol, Birmingham, Leeds, Warwick, Cambridge, Sheffield, Edinburgh and Oxford.

Interesting that Durham isn't included. Perhaps the more international companies have different preferences?

Thank you, useful advice. That happened this year in our school too. One pupil had an offer for medicine for Oxford and UCL but not Edinburgh (granted that medicine applications have their own process entirely). Though not so much for Cambridge where we had 20 applicants and only one offer which I think shocked school. One of the Cambridge applicants did get a reduced offer from St As though so he was happy.

Nice to think of the new generation going to Durham. My husband and our friends had a ball there so I hope they get a relatively normal experience after the pandemic disruption.

Durham is 13th on list @pinklavenders
The list of the top 20 is on pg 23 of the report
i found it interesting / mildly surprising that no London based unis appear until 12th place (UCL). These are usually near the top of lots of other types of rankings.

The High Fliers Research report 2021 is certainly a valid representation of the situation in 2019-2020.

However, a lot has changed in the last year or so. Remote working has resulted in decisions on graduate recruitment being increasingly made at a global level. Students offered graduate roles are increasingly being given a choice of location and location is less of a defining factor in hiring decisions.

International rankings now have a much more critical influence on hiring decisions. Graduates are no longer only in competition with graduates from other UK universities but now find themselves increasingly in competition with graduates from Princeton, Université PSL, National University of Singapore, etc.

The link I put on is to the 2022 report @JackieWeaver101 . However I take your point that it will not be so finely tuned as previously

@intwrferingma Congratulations on the Cambridge offer! Totally agree but between English universities it seems fairly transparent. If you are an RUK applicant to a Scottish university you are generally in the last pile after Scottish students (for obvious reasons) and overseas. You need to examine the odds specifically for RUK.

Which campus is geography in at Edinburgh? As the science campus is slightly out of the regular student area. Durham is super small and just a college town really. Edinburgh is a proper city.

@blue421 I think they will have a great time. My goddaughter is a current student and this year is embracing the studying and social side.

EwwSprouts while I managed to balance the studying and social side at Durham, most of my housemates definitely didn't! If I'm totally honest, I hope my kids are rather more sensible around alcohol than we were as students....

That was 6 years ago! But thanks anyway!

Longtimenewsee, I'm not disputing the research but a lot will change in the next year or so.

Due to fears that many graduate positions will not remain in the UK - if a graduate can work remotely within the UK, a graduate can just as easily do so outside the UK - the UK government has introduced a visa whereby graduates of the top fifty universities in the world have an automatic right to a visa to come to the UK and eligibility for these visas are based on world university rankings tables.

As a result of the above, graduates from universities such as Durham (ranked 92nd/162nd/301-400) could find themselves much further back in the pecking order of universities in graduate recruitment schemes while graduates from the University of Edinburgh (ranked 15th/30th/38th) will have less to fear as it will be more likely to hold its own.

@JackieWeaver101 I have no doubt you are right about the increasing globalisation of the job market.

It’s worth noting, though, that the QS rankings aren’t very highly thought of, they use metrics which massively advantage universities that take lots of international students – leaving aside whether that is a 'good thing' or not, for the purposes of this data English or Welsh students attending Edinburgh would be classed as 'international' so that skews the data hugely.

QS also favour universities strong in research, which really isn’t particularly relevant at under-graduate level. It means the academic staff might be doing excellent work themselves, but it tells you nothing about the quality of a university’s undergraduate course. Undergraduates aren’t responsible for citations. (By the by, it precludes the newer universities who don’t have the background in research but which might have exceptionally courses in particular subject areas.)

In short, the QS rankings aren’t very reliable, though I guess they have a small value if they are also viewed alongside other rankings tables.

OP - what did your DD decide? We (hopefully) are going to have the same predicament