How do you choose a university in this country?

[UniversityQuestions]

can anyone advise how you select a suitable uni in this country. My daughter’s schools seem to suggest names as potential matches for her that when I look up are wildly different in ranking, specialism, location but all seem the same in terms of low contact hours and minimal engagement with students. In my country it’s really clear how unis are ranked but here it varies wildly be aubjevt and you seem to also have to consider the overall name of the uni no matter what the subject ranking.

my daughter has good GCSEs - 10x 9s and 8s, we haven’t got her predicted grades for a level but she seems to have As or A stars at most tests. She wants to study History. Her school have suggested she book open days at Bristol, Newcastle, Manchester, Exeter and St Andrews which when I look them up seem to have no common denominators.

We looked at courses which were accredited, distance from home, ranking, cost of accommodation & not full of ex private school students & whether the city felt safe (in no particular order).

You can do searches on Unifrog, UCAS and find out rankings & how popular the uni is.

To be fair, all of DD's choices were sensible ones so she really didn't need much guidance. I recall doing a spreadsheet for the universities she was interested in with open day dates so that we could organise visits. Initially she looked at medicine which you have to be strategic about applying to anyway.

When she was unsuccessful she took a gap year then applied to the university that was her favourite at open days, but for a different subject and received an offer straight away. A first class STEM degree later and a couple of years working, she is now a student again doing a masters in a subject she loves at a university that is highly regarded for it.

Thinking about it I did help with researching but it wasn't me that was going to spend three years at university and the choice was entirely DD's.

@converseandjeans Where is “full of ex private school students”? I cannot see any uni where they are a minority? Do they have a fatal virus your dc might catch? Would you like it if I publicly stated my DC wants to avoid comp school alumni or dc like yours? Is it not time you educated your dc to be inclusive and happy to meet all dc irrespective of perceived background? It’s extremely tiresome to find we still perpetuate division and immaturity,

What's so bad about ex private school people?

My grammar school educated DC was friends with a few old Etonians. People who had gone to Harrow, Winchester etc. They are human beings as well.

I decided to zip my mouth when I saw that.

Kinda negates the point of university - which ought to be to broaden one’s horizons.

All of state educated DD's best friends at university were privately educated.

DS is privately educated and we live in a 3 bed semi on the main road in a crap town. His education is privileged for sure, but we are not remotely posh….. and even if we were, so what? It bewilders me that people make such blanket assumptions.

@TheFarriersDaughter I didn’t but I hate this self imposed anti private school dc who are in a minority everywhere!

@converseandjeans I'm a single mum yet my ds is at private school. He got a scholarship and loves it. He'll move to a uni to read engineering in September. Before then he needs to work all summer to save some money while I do the same.

So would you avoid him because he went to private school? Or because I'm a single mum feeding both of us on £50 a week? Are we too posh for you or not posh enough? !! 🙄 What a daft attitude.

Congrats to your DS on his hard work

I also know children of single parents who have had 100% of their prep and public school fees covered by scholarships and bursaries. For eight years. Recently.

I must remember to let them know there are MN parents supporting their young adult offspring in actively avoiding any contact with them!

I think it is very intense, there isn’t as much time for fun as there would be at a different type of university with longer terms. So if that would bother her then maybe Oxbridge isn’t what she would want.

She might really like Edinburgh, there’s a lot going on, but it is a less intense system than Oxbridge.

@TheFarriersDaughter Avoidance of privately educated dc is a common thread on MN HE board. It’s immature and I always call it out.

Re Oxbridge being hard work - if she got all 9s and 8s at GCSE she is clearly capable of hard work! Those are the sort of GCSEs which would definitely suggest Oxbridge is an option. There's no point visiting in term time to "see if the students are having fun" - you can't really tell that from simply walking around. However going to the open days and talking to students would be much better in terms of understanding what it's really like.

IME Oxbridge students often have loads of other interests and are very keen on pursuing them alongside their academic studies. They absolutely want to have fun as well as study! There is a very thriving social/extra curricular life at both Ox and Camb.

In terms of choosing, my DD (Y13 with offers to study history & politics) looked down the list of Russell Group universities, ruled out anywhere with a campus or London, then had a look at the actual courses, which narrowed it down a bit further, then sort of went on gut instinct in terms of which open days to go to. Then decided on her final list to apply to.

Do you realise Scottish universities are 4 year courses so you will be paying another year of fees, compared to English ones (assuming you are resident in England which it sounds like you are).

If a US liberal arts or great books style course is her ideal then I don’t think she’ll really enjoy any UK course. Nowhere offers anything like that kind of breadth + high contact hours in humanities. There is a huge gulf between Oxbridge and everywhere else in in the UK in terms of workload and overall average quality of the experience, and it has higher contact hours than elsewhere but the course will be very narrow compared to a US style liberal arts degree. I think she needs to do a bit more thinking about what she really wants. (And worth looking properly at US funding / scholarships as she has good results.) does she really care about history or does she like the idea of trying quite a few things? I’m not honestly sure whether a non-Oxbridge traditional humanities degree in the UK is worth the money at the moment. (I say that as an ex-academic who taught for decades in both Oxbridge and non-Oxbridge.)

@arionaterwhen you say it is “not worth the money”, what degrees in your eyes are? These days even vocational degrees like medicine does not guarantee employment

Interesting thought, @arionater …

I’m ex-Oxbridge, my sibling studied at one of the unis that’s not Manchester Uni, in that city. The sheer vibrancy of both of our academic experiences in the 80s and 90s (from two such apparently distinct institutions) - the amount of work required, the willingness of students to self motivate and get it done, the engagement of teaching staff with students willing to engage - was, we found, absolutely worlds away from the recent experience of a younger family member at a southern Russell Group uni. They reported being asked for one 2000 word essay per term. Fellow students having conniptions and citing damage to their MH if asked to participate in any work at all. Tutors who were never, ever available for even the briefest conversation outside the seminar room … We were honestly perplexed, and disappointed for the YA we’d spent 18 years talking to about how magnificent university would be … They definitely had a fabulous time socially, and achieved their pre-career goals - but none of us feel they got what they should have had in terms of scholarship and intellectual horizon broadening.

I'm not really thinking about employment. I think if you were thinking purely in terms of job prospects a good humanities degree from one of the best, say, 20 universities (which sounds like a pretty sure thing in this case) is probably still worth it; and of course lots of specific career options require a degree. I was thinking more in terms of how the average UK humanities university experience has changed in the last 20 years: expense has gone up massively and (realistically, and I say this with regret and in FULL knowledge of the degradation of working conditions for academics) the quality of the educational experience has decreased as pretty much all the "best" depts have been forced to take more and more students without an increase in staff numbers. Oxbridge has been largely protected from this and there are of course local exceptions and pockets of excellence. Working conditions in UK HE have declined a lot quite quickly and the morale in humanities depts at the average "excellent, research-intensive" university is really low this all trickles down to the student experience. So pragmatically, if I was advising someone determined to do a traditional humanities course outside Oxbridge, I would look at a) dept student numbers and how they have changed in the last 10-20 years in relation to the number of permanent staff (if you can get that info, though if I were in charge of these depts I would not be making it easy to find . . . ); b) who is actually doing the teaching -- permanent staff or temporary hourly paid people? (ditto); c) not just "contact hours" but specifically small-group hours and how much written work is required and how often. But this is all aimed at someone who really cares about the subject and the educational value. If you just want to have a nice time mostly doing other things (socialising and working on the side) and the relatively high cost is not a big issue then obviously a traditional humanities course is a great option precisely because the contact hours and written work requirements are low and you are almost guaranteed a 2.1.

Exactly!

I think contact time is over stated. Dc have had relatively low contact for decades. Some degrees, eg MFL, clearly require more dedication than, say, Politics, especially if you have two MFLs to learn as well as essays.

I also do not believe top 20 counts for much in terms of getting a job after a humanities degree. It’s far more nuanced than that. Dc really do need a good cv with work or volunteering on it. They actually need more than certain modules they like at the university because, most employers won’t remotely care if you studied the Roman invasion of Africa or studied Victorian foreign policy. It’s the skills you acquire that matter and ability to persuade an employer you are worth having. Therefore a top 20 university guarantees nothing much - even Oxbridge! They don’t have 100% employment stats for every course. The individual and their efforts make the difference and we are seeing fewer and fewer jobs so students very much need to concentrate on skills and personal presentation if they want a job.

The size of universities has grown and grown and it’s clearly a sector that hasn’t bothered with quality sufficiently. Employers know this so have their own tests and selection procedures. The skill the student needs is to pass these, not a deep knowledge of the Romans in Africa.

I also think students at LSE, Durham, Imperial, Kings, UCL, Bath and many others do work and some will play hard too. But that’s as it should be. Some courses will require plenty of engagement and many universities have very high achieving students so will get work if they want it enough.

I agree that contact time alone doesn't tell you much, which is why I specified looking at written work requirements too. A very traditional Oxford humanities degree, for example, say in English or history, can actually be very low contact time no compulsory lectures, just one or two tutorials a week. But if you have to research and write a 2000 word essay for every one of those tutorials, up to 16 in an eight week term, then obviously that is a much higher actual work-load than most other comparable courses. All humanities academics at open days etc will say that the point of low contact hours is that the course is reading-based and is largely in the student's own hands it is for them to do the reading, follow their noses etc. But the massive majority of people will not spend a term diligently reading and thinking if the only thing they actually have to hand in is one 2,000 word essay at the end.

If the breadth of the US system appeals, Scottish universities may appeal, as you usually can take a range of subjects in the first two years (with some exceptions, medicine, joint honours, etc., don't tend to have much flexibility).

However, that's part of what makes it a four year degree instead of a three year one, so an extra year of costs. Quite a few Scottish degrees will have the option to go directly into second year if you have high enough marks in the correct subjects – but then you will forfeit most of that subject flexibility.

@arionater One short essay is an outlier though. And which university and which course!?