Top city firms recruiting from Durham?

For Law, Durham also gives out A*AA offers solely.

For Law, Durham also gives out A*AA offers solely.



Bristol is an AAA course, with AAB contextual offers, whereas Durham is an A*AA course. This ignorance is why everyone on this board should ignore every single word that comes out of your opinionated mouth.

Bristol is an inclusive university, reknowned for reaching out to kids from poorer schools and giving offers on lower grades. Typical offers at Bristol are at about the same level as Durham (AAA or A*AB, LNAT required). The AAB contextual offer applies to the students from poorer schools only.

Interesting why you have run away just at the moment you lost the argument. Even if Durham ask for an extra A*, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realise that Bristol's AAA requirements will easily be exceeded by most successful applicants.

This is hilarious! As a recent law applicant to UCL, Durham, King's, Bristol, and York I can give you first-hand experience on how strict each university is in their application process and I can also give you examples from other students from my high-school.
I would say that the order of "difficulty to get in" from low to high was as such (I did the IB though, so I don't know about A-level.) : King's and Bristol (very low offers and easy to attain, 35 and 36 respectively), Durham (quite higher, with 38 points), and finally UCL with 39.
I chose Durham over UCL even though I could have gotten to UCL, since I got a 40. Everyone in my school did not understand at first why I made this choice, because they were completely unaware of Durham's excellence in law, and held UCL at such a high standard due to its international rankings. However, my brother had completed his LLB at UCL and convinced me to avoid it mainly due to the limitations of living in such a chaotic city. I personally preferred the collegiate system in Durham and the considerably smaller size of the university.

As for other students in my school; let's just say that a fair number of them got into the likes of Bristol and King's with quite average grades. Bristol even accepted some of the students who missed their offers!!! This is unheard of in Durham...

It is normal for many top universities to still take on students who miss their offer by one grade. There isn't going to be much difference between students getting AAA and AAB. Also, they take the LNAT score into consideration. As has been stated earlier, Bristol go out of their way to make lower offers to able students from poorer backgrounds, something which Durham does not do. Durham has decided to chase the UK league tables to save the embarrassment of being shown up in World rankings as a second rate university.

The problem is, none of the students I mentioned came from a poor background. They are all quite wealthy in fact. I am also aware of some of their LNAT scores and they were not that great.
I don't think anyone can deny that Durham has a top-notch law school. Whether or not it's on par with UCL does not really matter anyway because at the end of the day, recruiters look at other factors when comparing candidates from Russell Group universities. If a student finds that the academics and social life at Durham suits them better, I find it unreasonable that they choose UCL or LSE just because they fare better internationally. All of these universities have similar academic departments in quality anyway.

Why are you basing how good a law school is on how many people it gets into city firms? Maybe UCL has more academic students who pursue further study instead of entering the corporate machine? :/ not everyone wants to be a commercial lawyer!!

However, lawyers in the city are the ones that earn the most and working for a city firm or magic/silver circle firm is what most law graduates would dream of. Yes you can get into research or decide you want to be a professor but nothing beats working in the city if your a Lawyer. If big firms in the city are recruiting a large number from Durham as opposed to UCL then they must see value in Durham graduates.

UCL is a much bigger university than Durham, and the quality of graduates will therefore vary at UCL more so than at Durham. Many of their students will also be overseas students who won't be working in the UK post graduation. I have met some UCL Law students, and I am baffled at how clever some of them are, with A*AA typical offers being handed out by UCL as the norm.

Not all UCL buildings are nice, some need major refurbishment (and some are being improved). But they do have a number of posh buildings in and around the main quad, some of which you can't tell whether they actually belong to UCL as they look more like Civil Service White Hall buildings.

I've got to give great credit to Durham for luring some of the best Oxbridge rejects to their university over the last 10 years, but as a small £300 million a year institution they are unknown globally, and they don't engage with industry or help solve some of the UK's most challenging problems as what other Russell Group universities do.

Bristol and Durham are level for Law, no advantage going to either as they both ask for the same grades, and both are highly prestigious for Law. For overall reputation, Bristol seems to rank much better in World rankings, so I'd give the edge to Bristol. Bristol also has a much stronger research power. Durham just seems obsessed with keeping itself small and highly selective so that it can stay high up in UK league tables. The reality is that Durham hasn't got the resources or infrastructure to ever challange the World's great universities like Oxbridge, UCL and Harvard. They don't even have a medical/dental/vet school.