Sussex or Manchester for Economics BSc?

To be sincere with you, these 2 Uni's are both highly reputable (with Manchester possibly being slightly higher)

However, going to Sussex would not hinder your chances of achieveing the same as graduating from Manchester. They are both respected & Sussex is actually higher for the Economics course aswell. The only reason i didnt apply to it was because it was in Brighton & the accomodation looked like they were in villages but I fink Brighton is a village itself. But the campus itself was really awesome & i liked the way its designed.

So, for me i would advice you to choose whichever one would be much more compatible to your circumstances. Check out the social life, course content, trips & most especially, go to a place where you will me motivated to study. You don't want to go to the Uni for the reason of it being highly reputable but you find it hard to cope with the environment.

Also, a quick question; Which Uni is more further from London? I thought it was Manchester (which is really far anyway)

To be sincere with you, these 2 Uni's are both highly reputable (with Manchester possibly being slightly higher)

However, going to Sussex would not hinder your chances of achieveing the same as graduating from Manchester. They are both respected & Sussex is actually higher for the Economics course aswell. The only reason i didnt apply to it was because it was in Brighton & the accomodation looked like they were in villages but I fink Brighton is a village itself. But the campus itself was really awesome & i liked the way its designed.

So, for me i would advice you to choose whichever one would be much more compatible to your circumstances. Check out the social life, course content, trips & most especially, go to a place where you will me motivated to study. You don't want to go to the Uni for the reason of it being highly reputable but you find it hard to cope with the environment.

Also, a quick question; Which Uni is more further from London? I thought it was Manchester (which is really far anyway)

To be sincere with you, these 2 Uni's are both highly reputable (with Manchester possibly being slightly higher)

However, going to Sussex would not hinder your chances of achieveing the same as graduating from Manchester. They are both respected & Sussex is actually higher for the Economics course aswell. The only reason i didnt apply to it was because it was in Brighton & the accomodation looked like they were in villages but I fink Brighton is a village itself. But the campus itself was really awesome & i liked the way its designed.

So, for me i would advice you to choose whichever one would be much more compatible to your circumstances. Check out the social life, course content, trips & most especially, go to a place where you will me motivated to study. You don't want to go to the Uni for the reason of it being highly reputable but you find it hard to cope with the environment.

Also, a quick question; Which Uni is more further from London? I thought it was Manchester (which is really far anyway)

oh wait... the 2010 one says the same

http://www.ljmu.ac.uk/WoW/WOW_Docs/GM10Report.pdf

Don't let any stupid article manipulate you, I find it really hard to believe this sometimes but im guessing it is true. Its sometimes hard to believe because there are top & more reputable Uni's apart from Manchester & Warwick. Examples are Durham, Bristol, Bath, Nottingham & most especially Oxbridge. I really don't understand why the employers have done this but I assure you that it'll probably change as the year go on & you've still go another 3 years coming up so time will tell really.

P.S - Go the Uni that your heart lies with. I urge you

That stuff about being 'targeted' by employers can be a bit misleading. When people talk about being 'targeted' in investment banking they mean firms use university as a way of filtering down their number of applications so if you haven't been to a select list of 5 or 6 institutions they will probably not look at your CV.

Those articles which look at the universities which are most targeted by employers mean which employers go to the careers fairs. In this case Manchester because of its size, will always get more people at the careers fairs, but I wouldn't say that gives Manchester students an advantage when applying. In terms of the financial sector (outside of investment banking) loads of firms will go to careers events in Manchester whereas not many will go to Sussex. This is partly because there are financial firms in Manchester but not many in Brighton, and also because Sussex is a smaller university and has a culture of more left leaning policy types than wannabe financiers, so they get fewer applications from there.

If the posters above are from overseas then I will clear up some misinformation about these cities as I'm from Manchester and I know Brighton quite well. In terms of diversity, they are both fairly diverse cities but Manchester is more multi-racial. However, against that, Brighton is probably about the most 'tolerant' city in the UK, in terms of attitudes towards races, religions, sexuality, it is a very liberal minded place and there is not much hate there. So whilst in Manchester you get more 'communities' eg a big Chinese community, a big Indian community, a big Irish community, in Brighton you get lots of people from different backgrounds who all get on well, it is not seen as odd to be from overseas. In terms of the campus culture, because Manchester is much bigger you get more of those communities of overseas students, there are loads of Chinese/Indian/Gulf States students. Sussex has a lot of overseas students but their market for overseas students is probably more Europe (including the newer EU states) and Latin America.

In terms of the departments, Manchester is much bigger and probably in terms of research they have more research power as they have a lot of staff to cover different topics in Economics, and they have a lot of research centres which cross over into different subjects. Manchester's size is its power, and it is obviously well funded. Sussex is smaller, more specialised and does not have the same financial power with funding. Having said that the department is good for its size, I would say if you are interested in 'global economics', eg trade, development, international economics, then Sussex is a good place. I do regard Manchester as a good department but in recent years their student feedback scores have not been very good in the Economics department and I've heard a few complaints from students that they are not very student focused. On the other hand I know people from Sussex and they like this aspect because its a smaller department with fewer students, the teaching there is good.

Thanks for all that info...and I have realised myself that Sussex does tend to focus a lot on their students because it's a smaller institution whereas Manchester has so many people that it's hard to focus on every individual. However, I would like to go in to the financial sector in the city rather than the development side as a career eg. banking or other financial sectors. Do you reckon Manchester would be the better option for this?

I don't think it would make much difference out of those. Most financial careers would be open to students from either Manchester or Sussex providing they got a 2:1 or 1st, although it would be challenging getting into Investment Banking, or at least front office of an IB, because they tend to focus their recruitment on Oxbridge, LSE, UCL. If you want to go into stuff like accountancy, risk management, insurance, actuarial field, then either of those would be ok. Looking at their module lists on the website, Manchester has a wider range of options to choose from, thats the benefit of size, although Sussex does have a decent range.

From a networking/work experience/internships point of view, there will be more financial firms in Manchester than Brighton, and Manchester is only an hour away from Leeds which is the second city for the financial sector in the UK. However, Brighton is only an hour away from London and even closer to the London periphery like Gatwick where there are financial firms located. So whilst in general there are more financial firms around Manchester, Brighton gives you easier access to London, the area of East Sussex around Brighton is where you get some of the commuter population to London, ie people with families who wanted to get bigger houses away from the big city, live there and commute in to London.

You're very informative in this field...thanks a lot So is it almost impossible to get in to investment banking without going to Oxbridge LSE and UCL...isn't it more to do with links?

You will get a better answer if you ask them on the IB forum of this website. From my knowledge of it (as an outsider) the problem is autofilters. Remember there are thousands and thousands of kids who want to work in investment banking, so when the banks' HR departments get swamped with all those applications, they need a way to do a rough cut to get it down to a manageable number. So it makes sense to operate a filter based on 'target' universities.

When you do your economics degree you will study asymmetric information and 'signalling'. In the 1970s Joseph Stiglitz did some work on 'signalling' where he took the assumption that education does not directly improve performance in a job, but it 'signals' high ability to employers. To an extent I think this is what goes on in IB. They take people from all sorts of degrees, History, English etc, from Oxbridge, they are less bothered about the content the person has studied and more looking for the 'signal' of high ability. Hiring somebody in IB is a risk, you want them to work 100+ hours a week, be ultra dedicated, quick thinking, able to cope under high pressure. If someone has been to Oxbridge then they've had a high workload and been in an environment surrounded by high ability peers and felt the intellectual pressure of having to compete with them. So that's a safe signal to the bank that as long as the person could handle it and came out with a 2:1 or 1st, they are high ability. Now there will also be high ability people at other universities, but it is more difficult for them to 'signal' through their education alone, if you got into Manchester and Sussex and did well you might be super brilliant, you might be just 'decent'.

That said, there are always examples of a few students from outside the banks target institutions, who break their way into the bank. They have managed to signal themselves as different, in other ways. I met a girl last year from Sussex who works in FO at an IB which surprised me, but after about half an hour's conversation with her I could tell how she'd got in, she just had a certain confidence and mental strength about her which you could see had gone in her favour, she had obviously networked her way in.

But for specific advice on this I would recommend you ask on the IB forum about your chances of getting in, and what you need to do. Bear in mind it is hard even for Oxbridge students to get in so you will really need to be special to make it. The advice they may give you is get a 1st from Manchester/Sussex and then do an MSc at LSE or Oxbridge etc. However this will cost a lot.

The cynic in me wonders sometimes whether the high financial price of MScs at places like LSE are a form of signalling themselves to banks, ie they show that this person really is determined to make it, given that they have invested so much cash in a qualification to enable them to 'signal'.

But my original advice holds about going into other financial careers, its perfectly possible to have a good well paid job in the financial sector from a uni like Manchester or Sussex (eg a £60-80k job). Just it is harder to get a £500k job.

You're very informative in this field...thanks a lot So is it almost impossible to get in to investment banking without going to Oxbridge LSE and UCL...isn't it more to do with links?

I know many people that haven't been to Oxbridge or London Uni's that have still gone on into investment banking. It's a total myth in my opinion, granted you have to be in a respectable top 20 uni.

Would you say it's possible to get in to investment banking if you go to Sussex which is definitely top 20...or Essex...which isn't top 20 overall but specialises in Economics a lot and has one of the best Economic research departments in the country?