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Difference in Univiersities

I've never really understood the prejudice between top Universities and Universities lower down the table. Aren't they both offering the same course? Why does the employer care where you got it? or is it just down to the fact that top Universities have better teachers and therefore you're bound to excel better? I'm sure this posts seems incredibly naive and ignorant but any enlightenment would be helpful.

Reply 1

Classical Liberal

Top universities don't have better teachers - often they are worse because the top universities are top because of research not teaching.

Reply 2

Wahrheit

Top universities, in a sense, do the employer's job for them. If you have managed to get in to a highly competitive course, then that shows you must have been good enough to impress the university admissions tutors and achieve the grades for the offer. The average level of candidates who attend the top unis will be higher at the start of their degree, and it's fair to assume will also be higher by the end too

Reply 3

MagicNMedicine

Wahrheit is correct.

On an economics course you will study asymmetric information problems and screening / signalling to address them.

Going for a job is an asymmetric information problem, you have more information on your own characteristics than the employer does on you. If 10 candidates come looking for 1 post and all of them claim to be great at everything then how does the employer know who are high quality candidates and who are low quality?

Screening is where the employer uses an interview or assessment centre process, using their own tests to screen candidates' quality. Signalling is what the candidate can do to show something about their own quality - having good grades is a signal, going to a top university is a very good signal because it shows first that you have been good enough to get in (although that is often correlated to A-level grades so this isn't the most important part), the other key thing is top universities are known for their demanding and stressful courses, particularly Oxbridge, LSE etc. So for an employer in a field like investment banking where they need to see a signal that somebody can survive and thrive in a demanding and stressful environment, the fact that somebody has survived Oxbridge and come out with a good quality degree is a good signal, and so it reassures the employer that this candidate actually is pretty good.

Now sometimes on here you will see people saying stuff like "An Oxbridge 2:2 or 3rd is better than a 1st at an ex poly" but whilst that might be fine for students to argue about on the internet, in reality for employers looking for a signal, the 1st at the ex poly probably has more signalling power there. The Oxbridge 2:2 or 3rd says I was lucky enough to be given a chance at a top uni, but then I struggled a bit, so if the employer sees their environment as being similar in intensity to Oxbridge they might think hmm if we hire this person, we might get mediocrity. The 1st at an ex poly still leaves some questions, why did they not get in a top uni, but it says they thrived in the environment they were in, so they may be an undiscovered gem. Obviously the employer would want to see other things to clarify this in their mind, does that person appear from their CV to be somebody with drive that achieves things, has done interesting extra curriculars, are they strong and confident in assessment centres, if so they might be worth having a go.

But ultimately having a good degree from a top university does set you up very well because it means your CV always has a signal of your quality, so you start from an advantageous position.

In economics, the curriculum at different universities will vary. Typically at the top rated universities, the curriculum is very technical and mathematical, which also gives signalling power as it is tough, although there is more to being a good economist than being able to derive proofs and do equations. That extra quantitative background is useful if you want to go in to academic research in economics or do some quantitative modelling or so on with a bank or econometric research in a consultancy.

However at the vast majority of British universities you would get a good education in economics, the core micro and macro texts tend to be from one of the standard books that is used in the USA and UK for undergraduate level economics: eg for micro, Varian, Perloff; for macro, Blanchard, Mankiw (there are various others as well those are just a couple of examples), if your uni is teaching the syllabus based on one of the standard and respected core texts then if you study hard you will get the right economics background. If you go for something like the Government Economic Service or Bank of England where they have economics tests as part of the assessment centre then it doesn't matter where you went to uni, it's about whether you can pass their assessment, and any uni with those standard texts will prepare you for that.