Why your choice of university matters

Hi there, let's get back to a topic that is close to my heart: further education. I was quite shocked by a comment I received on one of my older articles, it was from an 18 year old Singaporean who had the audacity to say, "in my mind, I thought that a diploma/degree certificate would carry the same weight no matter which university I got it from." Okay, she realized she is wrong now, but allow me to address this point. In the Singaporean system, whilst there is streaming and you clearly have better, more popular schools than others, at the end of the day, when you sit for your O and A level exams, you are still taking the same exam, answering the same questions, being subject to the same grading standards. So even if you are from an unenviable, neighbourhood school, you still have the chance to prove yourself by doing as well as those from the most prestigious school if you simply produce the same good results at the exams. So by that token, the playing field is quite level at least for those in primary and secondary education in Singapore.

Will your degree serve you well?

However, that is no longer the case at university level - every university sets their own curriculum, decide what standards they want to set for their cohort and there isn't an overall body demanding that there is any kind of harmonization or equal standards across the board. So in this case, we turn to league tables to get a better understanding of how good or bad the universities are, relative to each other. The universities at the top of the league tables are notoriously hard to get into - you will need perfect results, have an outstanding record of activities beyond your studies and often, there will be a rigorous interview process as well. This is because the demand for places at these prestigious universities is so incredibly high that they can afford to raise the bar of entry to ensure that they will only get the very best students. In the UK, there are 127 universities in our league table. I would suggest that anything in the top ten is quite prestigious but anything in the top quarter of the league table is acceptable. The rankings do vary from year to year as the grading criteria change, but you're also dependent on the reputation of the university.

Need I state the obvious? The smartest students go to the universities at the top of the league table. The worst students who still want a degree end up at the universities at the bottom of the league table and as for the mediocre, average ones - well, they end up at the mediocre universities languishing in the middle of the league tables. Now you may argue that some mediocre universities or even those at the bottom of the league tables may have great programmes,superior teaching methods and excellent staff running the faculties - all that may be true but do we gatekeepers care about that? We don't give a shit, no - didn't you realize? We're not here to evaluate how good a university is performing or how well they teach, we're just here to make sure we hire intelligent candidates and reject the dumb ones so we're pretty much going by one criteria which trumps all the others: the entry standard. We making the assumption that a perfectly intelligent and rational student would always choose to go to a good university and not a bad one - so we'll always favor the candidates with a degree from a better university. This rather old-school approach needs to be coupled with further psychometric tests to ensure that we give everyone a fair chance, including those from universities that don't quite fit the mould - allow me to cite the case study of Loughborough University. 

In recent years, Loughborough may have done quite well in this year's ranking, but they scored painfully low on the 'entry standards' category: 410 vs Cambridge's 600 and Imperial's 567. What does this tell us? It means that Loughborough University would make an excellent choice for someone who has not done particularly well in their A levels, but it may be accepting a lot of very bright students who have done poorly in their A levels for some reason. Loughborough's score of 410 makes it look more like a second-tier university like Heriot-Watt (406) and Southamption (417) - which makes sense as those are typically the second-tier universities which accept students who didn't quite get the perfect results they want. This is surprising indeed, because Loughborough is ranked 7th this year whilst Heriot-Watt is ranked 34th, yet they had nearly identical scores in the 'entry standards' category, which is a reflection that Loughborough are doing a much better job in preparing their students for real jobs in the big bad working world. Still, it would not be the first choice for students who did get straight As, given their lower entry standards. Loughborough has an excellent reputation for sports science (quite a niche field), but they have struggled to establish a much more credible reputation for themselves in fields other than sports science.

I am guessing that it will take a few years yet for Loughborough's reputation to catch up with their standards - perhaps in 5 or 10 years, demand for places at Loughborough would increase to the point where you would need much better grades to earn yourself a place there. Only then, would Loughborough truly take its places as a top-tier university in the UK when it can attract students who would pick Loughborough over another top ten university. Right now, it is at best a promising university which performs incredibly well despite only being able to attract rather mediocre students at best. Now before any students from Loughborough starts leaving bitchy comments below, I must state that I am only talking about the statistics from the league tables. Loughborough has the lowest entry standards in the top 10 and the second lowest in the top 20, there are even universities like Aberdeen (ranked 42nd), St George's (ranked 44th), Strathclyde (ranked 48th) which much higher entry standards. This is confusing to say the least: if Loughborough is such a good university (and they must be doing something right), then why isn't it attracting students of a higher standard? And if they are only receiving mediocre students, then what kind of miracle are they performing at that university to produce such great results? Likewise, why is Strathclyde University performing so poorly then? Oh dear.

Yes students, we will judge you by your university

Likewise, for the universities at the bottom of the league table - well, the entry standards are painfully low. Once you get beyond the 100th milestone, they would probably let in anyone who can pay the fees without even checking if they are toilet trained or can write their own name. It is that bad, the statistics speak for themselves - that is what ranking tables are for. These universities are one step away from the notorious degree mills where you can buy any degree you want without having to study and pass an exam. Yes you will have to attend courses at these university, but the standards of the exams are so low that they will basically pass anyone for turning up. Why anyone bothers going to these universities is beyond me as us gatekeepers are not stupid - we know when someone has gone to a crap university at the bottom of the league table. It takes us a few moments to check the league table rankings on Google for crying out aloud. I can only assume that the parents of these stupid kids are in complete denial about how much mockery and scorn graduates from such crap universities will be subject to in the real world. 

After you graduate, you need to get a job and that's when you send off loads of applications, in hope for a job interview. Well guess who reads those applications? A gatekeeper, of which, I have been one - so I can tell you exactly what the process is from the gatekeeper's point of view. Whenever a vacancy for a good job appears, a gatekeeper will be flooded with applications from young people hoping to get that good job. Times are hard, anyone can get a low-level job working in Starbucks or McDonald's but if say you want to get into finance, it is bloody difficult and good opportunities are few and far in between. When the company selects a candidate, we have to pay the candidate during the first few months when we don't expect the candidate to generate too much revenue or add that much value to the business - that's okay, we don't expect everyone to hit the ground running from day one. There is usually a steep learning curve and most employers will be happy enough to give new employees at least a few months to climb that learning curve whilst paying them for their time to learn. In the meantime, the company will have to invest a lot of time and money in that new employee to ensure that s/he is able to do his job well. This is a normal process in recruitment.

Well, that's the plan at least. There are times when things just don't work out. A company can hire the wrong person who isn't suitable for the job - this wrong person fails to deliver (or for some reason is unhappy doing this job), struggles to fit in and has to leave after a few months. Now that's a disaster for the company because the company would have wasted a lot of time and money on this person who has just left and now, they have to start the recruitment process all over again. If that happens, the gatekeeper will be the one to blame for having allowed the wrong person to get the job. That is why gatekeepers are extremely risk-averse people because if they make a huge mistake like that, they could be fired because poor decisions like that cost the company a lot of money. The fact is your university has no freaking clue what job their students are going to end up doing once they graduate - so most of the time, none of the stuff you learn at university is relevant at all to what you end up doing in your job. Employers usually have to train up their new employees from scratch and all we want to know really, is that you are a intelligent, fast learner who can adapt to these new challenges and pick things new quickly. As for what you studied at university, quite frankly, I couldn't be less interested: it is completely irrelevant as far as I am concerned.

What does the choice of a candidate's university tell us? Well, to be blunt, let me state the obvious. We don't want to hire idiots and boy there are a lot of idiots out there. We want to hire someone who is intelligent and whilst exam results only demonstrate a certain facet of one's ability to learn and retain information, that's still a good place for us to start. The reality is that at the early stages, we have to start eliminating candidates to create a short list and having a degree from a university at the wrong end of the league table is the perfect excuse for a gatekeeper to eliminate a candidate at this stage. Why? Because this candidate has demonstrated that s/he hasn't been able to study hard enough to do well in an exam, that's why s/he ended up in a crap university. Yes, it is that cruel and blunt, especially when you're up against people from very good universities that only accept the very best students. When you have so many applicants for one position, it is pretty easy to reject those from crap universities.There will be other psychometric tests for candidates who make the shortlist, but you've got to make sure you do not fail at the first hurdle.

How do I know if you're stupid or clever?

A degree is meant to help you make the transition from being a student to working life - a good degree can set you up neatly for your first job, whilst a bad degree could mean that the odds will be against you. Many people are in denial about this harsh reality, but think about it this way: if you have to run a 10 km cross country race, would you rather be wearing the best running shoes from Nike or would you rather be wearing a really heavy pair of rubber boots? Bear in mind the fact that you will be racing against some runners who will be wearing the best running shoes money can buy, you'd really want to have a decent pair of shoes to wear for this race rather than wear the rubber boots. Talk about having the odds in your favour! You can further enhance those odds by proving that you're capable of functioning well in the work environment by amassing plenty of work experience and internships whilst you are a student - all this, to convince the gatekeeper that you're more than ready to become the ideal employee they are looking for.

Furthermore, we know what we're looking for in an ideal candidate - we'd like someone who knows how to think things through, take initiative, solve problems and come up with innovative solutions and make feasible long term plans. So if I were to come across a candidate with a degree from a crap university at the wrong end of the league table, I would be the first to ask a difficult question like, "why did you choose to do a degree at this university, given its ranking in the league tables? Was it a wise choice? You didn't think this one through, did you?  You see, there's just no easy way to give a good answer to that question, that is the kind of question designed to stress a candidate out and see how well they perform under stress. If the candidate tried to defend their choice by highlighting the things they learnt at the university, then I would come back with a question like, "yeah but you could have done all that at a much better university, with a much more respectable ranking, then we wouldn't be having this conversation now. You messed up, admit it. I'm wondering if you're going to mess up like that if we hire you. What do you have to say about that?" The fact is nobody with straight As would deliberately choose to do a course at the wrong end of the league table.

Why have the odds against you in life?

I suppose if I was in that situation, I would own up and agree with the gatekeeper - that is the only way you take the sting out of the attack. By agreeing with the gatekeeper who's trying to provoke you, you're catching him off guard by surprising him. I would attack my own university and tell the gatekeeper exactly why it is a terrible university and why it was such a poor choice. Then I would plead the ignorance of youth, "look, I was young, I made a bad mistake - it was a poor error of judgement on my part but I'm no longer the same person today. I've done so much growing up whilst I was at university, I hope you will not judge me for that one bad choice I made all those years ago, but instead allow me to prove to you how I have grown and matured as a young adult in the last three years - I have made good use of my time at university working part-time, travelling around the world and doing internships. I wasn't going to rely on my university to teach me everything I needed to know to prepare me for the working world - no, rather I took the initiative to prepare myself. I've done everything I can to put things right, so I will not suffer the consequences of one poor decision I made when I was a teenager. Nobody is perfect, nobody can claim they have never ever made a poor decision before - we all have. But it is how we bounce back and recover from those situations that really matters."

The fact is you can look at the average earnings of Oxford graduates and compare that to the earnings of graduates from a university at the wrong end of the league table - it is clear that there will be a direct correlation between the ranking of the university and the earning power of the graduates. The pitfall that so many people fall into is trying to make an example of the exceptions to the case, "look, Mr Tan got a degree from SIM/Mr Tan didn't even go to university, yet he is such a rich and successful businessman today!" Sure, of course there are success stories of people who did succeed despite having had the odds stacked against them - but let's not pretend for a moment that it would make any sense trying to follow in their footsteps. The fact that these people triumphed against the odds proves at the very least that what they have done is highly unusual and hard to replicate - it would hardly be a good reason to try to follow in their footsteps and hope for the same outcome. Sure Mr Tan may have triumphed against the odds, but don't you think life would have been so much easier if he had been a graduate from Oxford? You can't argue with statistics and the way the odds are calculated. You can at best make a case that you are the exception to the norm.

Are you the exception to the norm?

Of course, all this can be avoided if you do get yourself a place in a university very near or at the top of the league tables. Some of you may argue that getting a degree from a top university doesn't guarantee a successful career - sure, but it can't hurt your chances; by the same token, getting a degree from a crap university doesn't necessarily doom you to a life time of failure, but the degree will not help you get ahead in life. I don't want to get too negative about this: if you do become a huge success in a few decades, it would be in spite of rather than because of that crap degree. Have you ever seen those people who run a marathon in a fancy, heavy and uncomfortable costume (see clip below) just to raise funds for charity? Yes it is possible to complete a marathon whilst being totally inappropriately dressed like that - but they complete the marathon in spite of the costume. It's the same thing with a crap degree, you're going to pay a lot of fees and spend 3 - 4 years at university anyway, then you may as well get a good degree,

Furthermore, an important part of the university experience is making new friends - now these contacts may or may not be useful or relevant to you in your career, but it is an important learning experience and a great place for you to develop the kinds of social skills you will need as a working adult. If you go to a prestigious university at the top of the league tables, then you're more than likely to network with other high achievers, even other scholars. If you go to a university at the bottom of the league table, then you're at best trying to make the best of a bad situation whilst mostly meeting losers. Networking with people who are more intelligent, more privileged and more successful than you can be an intimidating experience if I may be honest, speaking from experience - but at the end of the day, I wanted to eventually work with such people rather than people who are less intelligent, less privileged and less successful than myself. I think a lot of that depends on your mindset: do you avoid people who are more intelligent and privileged than you because you feel intimated? Well I think my parents do exactly that - that's why they have chosen to work as primary school teachers, where they are always sure that they feel smarter than their students. On the other hand, I know I am less intelligent and privileged than my directors in my company, but I am grateful for the opportunity to work for people like that and learn from them. What could my parents have possibly learnt from their primary school students? Probably nothing - but they were perfectly content with the situation where they felt comfortable.

Lastly, yes I know I am going to get a lot of hate from people who accuse me of being elitist. What I would say in response to that is that I'm merely telling you what the world is like - don't shoot the messenger for the message. Or to use another cliche: don't hate the player, hate the game. Such is the world we live in - sure there are kind people out there who are going to be nice and encourage you even if your academic track record resembles a train crash, but gatekeepers are not going to be one of those people. Don't mistake a gatekeeper for a kind grandparent who will be very kind and indulge you - we'll do quite the opposite and rip you apart for laughs. So unless you have a doting grandfather or uncle who's in a position to give you a well paid job (hey, nepotism goes a long way in a cruel and unfair world - just look at the Trump administration today), then at least be prepared to understand how these gatekeepers think because whether you like it or not, you are still going to have to face them each time you apply for a job.

Okay guys, that's it from me on this topic. Perhaps many of the points I have made in this post are pretty obvious, but still I hope it is going to generate a useful discussion particularly for my younger readers who are making very important decisions about their further education and future career.  Let's hear what you think about this issue guys. Do let me know your thoughts on this issue please, leave a comment below and we'll chat. Many thanks for reading.