Degree classifications and uni blind recruitment

[Stilton65]

Wondering if anyone can explain this to me? I've read on a number of threads on here that many employers are moving to uni blind recruitment and that it is therefore, in some cases, more advantageous to get a 1st than to go to a higher ranked university and get a 2.1 (obviously both would be great!). My understanding is that there is meant to be parity across the universities in terms of what would be worthy of a 1st or a 2.1 and so on and that they are externally audited?

I came across this article in the TES showing % 1sts etc from Sept 24 TES . Screenshot below ranks the ones that give the highest proportion of firsts - the top seems to have been cut off but the 2nd % column (Imperial 52) is % 1st. Imperial and UCL are very high up but Oxford is 16th, Cambridge is 22nd and LSE 23rd. So it's much easier to get a first at many unis with relatively low offer requirements than some of the most competitive, and I do find it hard to believe that these final degree classifications are equal?!

I can understand the rationale behind blind recruitment but I don't see how it can be taken seriously with data like this? Anyone?

Just to me I think there's something about being a Cambridge graduate and having the Cambridge experience and being able to say "I went to Cambridge" that I would have personally liked.

Anyway it doesn't apply to me as I didn't grow up in the UK.

Having taught in America and supervised PG and postdoc tutors, I agree with this. My university had a formal teaching development programme for those giving supervisions and those PDs giving lectures.

The UK is catching up, with the Higher Education Academy.

It is obvious that a demanding two year programme will teach nearly roughly twice as much content as a demanding one year programme. (Not quite as much, I think, because of module overlap and variances in structure). Many international businesses and industries simply want the Masters qualification and students correctly realise that they can achieve it in half the time in the UK as in the US.

I also believe that if you do a BSc in STEM a good MSc will prepare you for doctoral study. So will the M(STEM Subject).

Whatever league tables say, I do not believe that the one year Oxford MBA is the equivalent of the fabled two year Harvard MBA. Is it valuable? Of course. But see above.

I trust QS world rankings more

Let's hope that the UK is catching up. Nevertheless, formative experiences (eg tutorial/supervision system) create a strong blueprint and my feeling is that Oxbridge trained academics not working within the Oxbridge system often have quite a fierce attachment to that formative pedagogy.

@poetryandwine HBS 2-year MBA vs Oxford (or INSEAD) 1-year MBA? I really really don't think that anyone learns twice as much at Harvard as at INSEAD and I am extremely well acquainted with many graduates of both MBAs. The relative success (power/money/position) of Harvard MBAs has to do with other factors, in particular selection on admissions.

I'd suggest that the purpose of many master's degrees isn't to teach you more "stuff" although obviously there's content, rather it's to advance other skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, independent learning etc. and if you can demonstrate this in 1 year there's little point teaching more content for a further year.

QS world rankings are highly manipulable. Much more so than any other major league table.

What league tables do you rate, @poetryandwine ? I'm dubious about all of them tbh. The QS subject categories seem to me more reasonable than most.

I am dubious about all league tables.

However QS is conducted very informally. Hundreds of thousands of academics are asked to recommend Schools and Departments in their field, across the world. Any except their own. It is highly susceptible to ‘you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’. TBF there are other elements to their ranking but this is a major one.

I think the very top and bottom are pretty good but outside of my personal knowledge why do I think that? Received wisdom, which correlates with other, more objective league tables.

The Shanghai rankings seem to have good metrics (I attended a presentation ages ago), albeit ones in tune with the values of Chinese academia - fair enough. They strive for objectivity. However the rigidity and the granularity mean that there can be wild swings when, for example, a relatively minor university recruits a Nobel laureate.

For fairly academic UGs I think The Times and the Complete University Guide have useful rankings. They both have a research component. Even the brightest UGs don’t need to be surrounded by cutting edge researchers, but being taught by a good proportion of people who are excited about reasonably mainstream research changes the vibe, in a good way.

Back in the 1990s only 6-7% of students achieved a 1st class degree. I'd applied to an ex poly (tbh didn't know much about the uni system and classifications as I came straight from abroad), from a non-English speaking country (was taught English at school).

I worked hard and was fortunate to achieve a 1st class and top of year. I also had my undergraduate degree project published in a reputable peer reviewed journal. I think possibly that latter piece was seen as quite a good thing when I applied for roles. But possibly more so was that I'd spent time abroad, travelled, worked (in not particularly illustrious roles) - I guess showing I could 'graft'.

I'm now in a role where all my colleagues attended RG unis, a few Oxbridge. For what it's worth, I'd not say the Oxbridge lot are more successful than the other RG colleagues at all.

But then I don't think any of us went through the formal, big grad schemes.

There are other ways to get into jobs: try small, mid-sized, a lot of these are still very much looking at applications holistically (until AI catches up everywhere).

@poetryandwine You raise an interesting point about the need or otherwise of being taught by cutting edge researchers. My feeling is that in some, often STEM and quantitative disciplines, undergraduates are learning quite a lot of fundamental topics that aren't cutting edge and they need those fundamentals before moving on to cutting edge stuff. But in some humanities and social science disciplines it's a bit different in that fresh perspectives are really important.

Fair enough, @Ceramiq My perspective is STEM. A research perspective or outlook is clearly beneficial there as well (for strong students)

DS’s is in his second year of a competitive grad scheme with an employee that recruits “uni blind”. It uses own series of tests for selection. DS has a first class degree (and a Tripos prize) from Cambridge as do two of the other three grads recruited in the last two years in his team.

Going back to the idea that the value of an MSc, particularly a vocational one, is externally determined, I looked up the top 100 QS ( because we were discussing it) and Financial Times (guessing that it is relatively market driven) MBA programmes for 2024.

Here is the breakout for UK vs USA. The numbers are the rankings:

QS Rankings

UK: 5, 7, 18, 19, 30, 47, 58, 68, 72

USA (including about 5-6 programmes with similar pedagogy in Canada, Mexico and Costa Rica):

1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 22, 23, 31, 34, 35, 37, 39, 42, 44, 50, 54, 56, 57, 59, 60, 62, 64, 66, 68, 72, 72, 72, 76, 76, 83, 84, 85, 86, 88, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 95, 98

QS is the less formally constructed league table. When you consider that the UK is about 1/5 the size of the US, it is holding its its own, except the the top 4 places are all American.

The FT Rankings:

UK: 8, 26, 29, 39, 46, 54, 60, 68, 78, 80, 86

USA etc: 1,3, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 21, 23, 30, 33, 33, 38, 40, 42, 42, 44, 48, 49, 51, 53, 55, 55, 59, 62, 69, 70, 76, 81, 82, 83, 84, 86, 86, 90, 93, 100.

The overall ratio is very good but the difference at the top striking. The UK has only one entry in the top 25. It has 1/3 as many entries ranked above 50 as the US does, with 1/5 the population.

This is not bad at all; the world’s top 100 MBA programmes by any metric are all very good. However even though it’s not Harvard at the top of either league table, the preponderance of American schools at the top of these league tables and others suggests that the world does recognise the value of the 2 year MBA programme.

@ofteninaspin Of course they get recruited! Uni blind changes very little when large numbers of Oxbridge grads apply. The cream rises in another way.

It’s really only stem courses where DC need to worry about high quality research driving standards that employers respect. My DD1 did MFL and no one cared a jot. DD2 did a fashion related course and no one cared a jot who taught her either. Let alone being that fussed about course content. Post degree neither use their degrees in an obvious way. However where they went might just be a preferred uni for some employers. Definitely for DD1 but it was a later Diploma course that opened doors for DD2. Not her degree.

My theory for Imperial being at the top is

a) their intake - they take only the cream and have an incredibly large foreign-born student population. DC1 just graduated from there (with a 1st!) and always said that the foreign students had been educated to a far higher level at school - in particular in maths.

b) Imperial is all STEM and I think STEM subjects are harder to pass than humanities but easier to get a 1st if you work hard.

c) Imperial is absolutely rolling in cash and can provide students with the best

@TizerorFizz I am concurr

imperial is top due to its ESG score. Have a look at the category scoring breakdown that QS provide. It’s quite illuminating.

That's because your DD1 didn't carry on with her undergraduate subject. And in any case, undergraduate MFL in the UK doesn't usually entail any need for proximity to cutting edge research. In vocational humanities and social sciences degrees, being exposed to cutting edge research ASAP is, on the contrary, extremely powerful.

I find that horrific. It's no wonder there are so many issues.

I went to an elite ( ok RG) university in the 80s and I studied an humanities subject. Nevertheless there were fewer than 80 in my cohort and two of us, including me, achieved a first. This was entirely in parallel with other institutions at the time. The teaching was exceptional.

30 to 50 per cent or higher awarded a first class degree?

Dear God. This is what the commodification of higher education has brought us to.

You are correct, and it is a big problem. We pretend it is because we have switched from a sort of curve to grading on outcomes, but this is another polite veneer.

Our individual exam questions are a bit easier than they were 10-15 years ago. The structure is notably easier: questions must be broken into manageable pieces. Most strikingly, the questions cannot vary too much from year to year, and/or must be very similar to coursework. Anything else generates complaints to the Staff-Student Committee and the Director of Undergraduate Studies comes down hard on the lecturer.

For the past few years the only way to know who the top students were has been by the quality of their UG dissertations, because most choose to do them. AI has not developed to the point where it can write the technical aspects of these dissertations but I suspect it is being used inappropriately to improve some of them now. The oral exam usually catches this out and the dissertation mark suffers, but prosecuting the academic dishonesty is very difficult. All most depressing.

One of our DC is still at university and, tbh, I am blown away by how demanding and difficult her coursework is compared with what I was doing in the 1980s. So it's not all bad. I did very well at university but the standards were shockingly low IMO. Popular RG.

@Ceramiq Yes she changed but her first degree wasn’t vocational. I would say it prepared her brain and personal anttributes for alternative study. MFL is not a vocational degree for the vast majority. Most humanities degrees are not. We do however need bright people to study humanities. Neither does it matter one jot what world ranking RG unis are to most employers. Not everyone competes on a world stage.

DH can only remember one first in his cohort in the 70s. They were rare. Obviously dc at uni are not magically brighter. The courses meet their learning styles which produces false results.

I agree with you about selectivity, but that is true at all top programmes (not that you implied otherwise).

Shanghai ranks American MBA programmes even more highlythan QS and FT do, though they make different choices, and puts Harvard at the top. They have no UK programmes in the top 10, though INSEAD is.

We could debate the exact proportions but the world’s business experts are consistently ranking two year American programmes as the best. As I don’t doubt your experience, this raises a perpetually interesting question: what is the connection or otherwise between what you learn during HE and the knowledge and skills you are able to deploy at work?

Also, how much of what’s been learned is expected to be evident in the ordinary way on the job? Are some skills - for example, anticipating and preventing crises - invisible?