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Masters at a top uni

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RickRoll

Is it difficult to get into LSE/Oxbridge/Warwick Economics Masters,
after:
1. unis like Aberdeen, Glasgow or Dundee, from which I'd get BA in a technical subject
2. the same as above, but BA in Economics?

Hmmm, I've just come across this thread- and it seems like another case of blowing one's own trumpet about what a 'top' university is, and a misunderstanding of Scottish universities, probably through willful ignorance.

In short, the 'difficulty' is being towards the top of your peer group when you graduate. Those universities are absolutely fine- especially in the case of Glasgow, no one with any serious knowledge of higher education is going to knock you back on the basis that they are not 'top' universities. One certainly is, the other two, like most Scottish universities, take the best local students- given the odditities of free higher education in Scotland and the different exam system. Glasgow, for example, has one of the highest numbers of students in the top tenth of their graduating high school class of any university in the UK, the reason being that it sits in the middle of an urban area of 2million people, and the best Scottish residents within that urban area tend to end up there. Given the need to sit and pass three advanced highers to get into English universities, which as mentioned several times more for Scots- the best tend to end up at Glasgow, Edinburgh or Aberdeen- depending on which is closest. St Andrews is slightly different on the account of only a third of students actually being Scottish, and 40% of them from private schools and the local area only has 18,000 residents- so the local dimension isn't there to anything like the same extent.

Anyway- the point of this is, it's recognised that people don't always follow the league table 'rank' of a university, partly because it's ludicrous, partly because the difference between most Russell/1994 group and others is small, and partly because there's plenty of other reasons for choosing a university- location and cost being one of them, exam system for Scots the other. In other words, with a first from a university like Glasgow, or even Aberdeen or Dundee, won't be thrown out because an employer is as blinkered as your average TSR user and thinks that a Bristol graduate is 'better' because their university is top 10 in a newspaper table. I have a first-class Scottish degree- I applied for both Economics and History courses (and settled on Economic history) at both Scottish and English universities, as well as IR at Johns Hopkins, and got in to all of them- LSE wanted a 2:1 from me, and I ended up with a scholarship to one of Oxford's most competitive colleges.

What Danny says, to a limited extent, is correct though- there aren't, looking at our faculty roll call, many graduates with degrees from some of the less well established universities here at Oxford. There's Glasgow, Edinburgh, St Andrews, Aberdeen degrees though, along with the usual suspects from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cambridge, and then others who went to the best universities in their countries- UCD/TCD, UBC, Munich, as well as just the best in their State or region like Pitt or North Carolina. It'd be harder to get here I'm sure if you merely had 'good' scores (and the 70s system doesn't exist at the Scottish Ancient universities, which is indicative of how much some people know about them- it's a non-linear marking system, out of 20 or 22) from some lesser places like Danny suggested but not impossible, like he also suggested- but admission panels will attribute weight to certain places knowing that they're at the very least a pull factor for the best students in their region, and the universities you've suggested there certainly are- Glasgow a bit further than that, going on its UCAS average entry tariff which is amongst the top dozen or so in the UK. Getting a first puts you in the top 10% or so of that peer group, and with the right references (I didn't take any hugely maths intensive modules either) and some other perks such as winning academic prizes and the like- entry is well within reach, and if you're lucky, a scholarship too.

Finally, for Econ, Oxford do an M.Phil in Economics, it's two years and is often taken by people with no formal background in economics- an Eng/Maths friend of mine who graduated from Edinburgh is on that course- and they sell it as needing no economics degree to gain admission to, but a related subect would obviously help. The diploma may well be needed elsewhere- but I wasn't pushed towards it at any university where I applied, and only a third of my degree was economics, the other two thirds history.

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