Daughter about to start Uni, having a wobble and thinking she should have gone to a higher Ranked Russell Group Uni!

[WhatsTheStoryRory]

My daughter did her A levels in the summer and got all A*s in 4 STEM subjects.
She accepted an offer to study a STEM subject in a non Russell group uni because that's the one she liked the best when we visited.
The Uni she liked is very well rated and is a couple of hours drive from the city we live in.
She's gone through the whole process of applying for Student loan and choosing accomodation.

She's now having a wobble and thinking she should have accepted an offer she had from a Russell Group Uni in the city we live in.
The main reason seems to be, that she thinks future employers will give preference to those who went to higher ranked Uni's.

She's even mentioned taking a year out and re-applying for next year.
We've said we'll support her whatever she decides.

Is it even possible to change Uni's at this late stage?

I was going to say to consider changing until you said Bath, which is excellent. I wouldn’t change from there!

FWIW, some recruitment is now blind, plenty is not. But Bath will help not hinder in that regard.

My Dd course (nat sci) has higher entry requirements at Bath than Durham and Bristol.Do LSE offer many STEM subject??
Oxbridge are about the aptitude tests and interview more than A level results for STEM subjects

I am a former RG STEM admissions tutor and I love Bath. When I first joined Mumsnet, I recommended it as the hidden gem of UK STEM HE. But Bath has been outed: it was The Times University of the Year 2023.

Ad PP have said, RG is largely a marketing tool. Savvy employers know this and many others don’t care; then there is the trend towards blind recruitment.

OP, I do wonder if your very intelligent DD may have another reason for preferring to stay in her home town? Are finances tight? Is she involved in a new romance, or the possibility of a clandestine one? Are you pregnant? Etc

Or:: Is. ‘the local university’ Cambridge, Oxford, Warwick, or Imperial? The COWI schools are in a class apart. With 4 A stars, DD has a decent chance (though not a brilliant one) anywhere. Aspiring to a COWI school is understandable

Absent personal reasons for staying home, turning down Bath for anywhere else (with a year out) seems most likely to be a wobble

I hope DD will go to Bath

My DS has just finished his degree at Imperial and I know Bath was also on his list. But I'm interested in the fact that people here are saying that employers now recruit blind. Surely its the case that degrees are "harder" at unis higher up the league table? So harder to get a first at Cambridge than eg University of Leicester? If so what is the incentive to go to a "higher" so called university if a first from Leicester will be rated more highly than a 2:1 from Cambridge (which may be more difficult to get) from an employment point of view (or am I misunderstanding?).

Why wouldn't you swap Bath for Liverpool or Newcastle? They are fantastic Universities.

As almost everyone else posts Bath is very highly regarded, especially for STEM. As others also say, many people rate it on a par with RG unis in a list called RG+ – with Lancaster, St Andrews and Loughborough. No disadvantage from studying STEM there – in fact an advantage. Mate of DS's did maths there and had a great year in industry, now has a great graduate role.

I was also betting it was Bath or Lboro you were talking about @WhatsTheStoryRory

Ignore @LadyGabriella as they are posting outdated advice. Yes Liverpool and Cardiff and Newcastle and Southampton are in the RG, but good unis tho they are, the fact that they are in a group with Oxford, Cambridge, Warwick, UCL and LSE does't put them on a par with those institutions. Bath can totally hold its own. DS2 actually had a lower offer from RG Newcastle (which we loved in many ways) than he did from non-RG Lboro (where he is studying).

And I am really not sure what the presence of a medical school means in terms of a uni. There's one at Leicester uni btw (mind you I rate Leicester!) and also at Worcester. Maybe @LadyGabriella thinks STEM stands for medicine? the M is maths.

Anyway - best of luck to your DD @WhatsTheStoryRory - she has done amazingly well.

Bath’s a fantastic uni and an absolutely brilliant place to learn to be a young independent adult. There’s lots to do culturally and for students (as there are 2 unis) but it’s the size of a town. It’s a very safe place to live and it’s a beautiful city. She chose it because she would have got a sense of all of that when she visited. Reassure her she needs to trust her gut and tell her to stop fretting.

Perhaps she is just getting nervous about the whole thing of moving away. I will encourage her to start at Bath. Or do you feel a year out will help her mature/grow up a bit? Can she defer?

It's a funny time anticipating the big move. A sort of sliding doors moment thinking that you'd have a different life if you'd made another choice, letting go of some aspirations and feeling some FOMO and sadness perhaps and then standing on the diving board and launching yourself into the water and committing to one path/plan. It's a lot.

Hopefully it will all settle one/two months in and of it doesn't then come up with a new plan then. Hopefully the RG thing will fade away once she meets her peers and sees how it really doesn't tell us anything about somewhere excellent like Bath.

My engineer DD has just been messaging me from her massive hotel room in the USA where she's on a work trip. She is a Swansea graduate. Not RG. Not top ten but good engineering school with strong industry links and great place to be a student.

Good luck to your DD. And to you.

Not equating Swansea with Bath before someone quotes league tables. Just saying lots of routes to success and happiness, even if it's not the plan you started with.

Quality of education?

I think the point is, having an Oxbridge etc degree doesn't necessarily mean you are the best candidate for X job. The idea is that you take people based on their skills and experience, rather than because they went to the same university as you.

It may be that having a 'top' degree from a 'top' university may make you the best qualified candidate and of course that is what you would hope. But it's not a given.

Not even then.

I went to uni in 1984 and Bath was definitely considered a top choice. A friend of mine had it as her second choice after Oxford for biology.

I do think it's odd the way people talk about "employers" as if they're some amorphous group. I work in a department with several Oxbridge graduates at a low level headed by someone who went to a polytechnic. I doubt we're unique.

In Scotland this isn't a thing. Out of interest are any Scottish unis RG's? Because it's something we don't even know about ( or care about I guess).

Bath is highly regarded. It won’t hold her back.

True and important!

I think you will find that the calibre of student is quite high at Bath. Most will have achieved high A Level grades. It is often an insurance choice after Oxbridge along with Warwick. We had had the same question asked this week as my DS also did extremely well in his A Levels but he loved Bath. I also have an older son studying a stem subject at a RG Uni so in the position to be able to compare the two. I don't think RG's are always all they are cracked up to be.

A harder degree programme should teach you more. Ideally that should include both disciplinary knowledge and soft skills. Then a well designed selection process should give you the chance to show this knowledge and these skills to advantage.

It seems that a’well designed selection process’ is key, and not easy. However when
(parts of?) the Civil Service switched to blind recruitment the proportion of Oxbridge graduates increased. It is thought that the skills learnt in all those tutorials drove the increase

Edinburgh and Glasgow

Ooooh tough one.

Bath is brilliant, but with 4 A*s I’d be taking the year and reapplying. Going to interviews with results like that in hand and a great year out story will be so valuable.

DD achieved a first in A STEM subject at an RG university. However, her cohort was huge and there was no rapport between the students and teaching staff as they had different tutors and lecturers for each topic within the different modules. I don't think they had the same teaching staff for more than a few weeks before they were on to a different topic. The only tutor she had any kind of regular contact with was her dissertation supervisor.

Her first personal tutor was useless. She had a meeting with him in the first fortnight in a group with his other 5 tutees, then never saw him again. He never turned up for the second meeting and DD never heard from him again.

I advised DD to change tutor as she would need a reference once she left university. She had one meeting with her second tutor and never spoke to her again, and when she needed a reference the tutor had no idea who she was.

She needs a couple more references now for her post grad application, and couldn't even remember the name of her personal tutor to start with. Luckily her dissertation supervisor has come up trumps, and I'm sure her personal tutor will do the same.

Basically, RG universities are not all that they seem to promise.

I will add that DD enjoyed her time at university and the hands off approach has made her very resilient.

What is so special about the Russell UNIs? Elitest/old bot network?

Did a lot of graduate recruitment/interviews for my last company. the university they came from did not come into the equation, it was how they performed at the assessment centre that they were ultimately judged on.

I went to a local college for a technical training, was employed for 40 years and a very decent salary no regrets whatsoever. Lot of friends did the same.

Bath is hugely highly rated for STEM - DS is at Cambridge but has several friends who didn't make the cut who have gone there. I think she's overthinking the RG thing and perhaps more having a wobble about going away?! (In my profession, the best ranked course came from a very obscure ex poly - what matters is the course/teaching and the calibre of graduates from it - Bath is very highly rated for STEM subjects)

It depends on the course your DD is doing, but I'd be wary of taking a gap year with STEM subjects - when DS was applying and wanted a gap year, he was advised that many places don't like it because it's easy to lose acuity/speed, particularly with maths. DS was very glad he hadn't had any time off from FM A Level to Engineering - he said the speed and depth was beyond his FM curriculum by about week 3 and he would have struggled having not done maths for more than a year at that point!

Russell group doesn't really mean much- it's just a promotional group. University of bath will be great if that's what she liked. She needs to remember what she liked about it. She could end up at a russell group uni and then hate it.

Why?

The universities that ask for such stellar A level results are extremely competitive to get into. On this and other forums I have read of many parents being disappointed that their ultra bright DC have failed to get into a university of their choice.

Bath is very highly ranked. Four of the universities in the CUG top 10 are not RG. It is a just a marketing tool, and clearly very effective judging from some of the responses on here.

Yes, this is the key difference. Bath has a superb reputation wordlwide.