Why do people go to crap universities then?

Hi there, in my last post, I talked about people who were clearly not cut out to be students going to private universities to get a degree not worth the paper it was printed on - squeezing a square peg into a round hole. Let's face it, to get into one of the top universities in the world, you need to be good at passing exams and not every one can deliver straight As in school. So why do people with terrible results still want to go get a degree from a university at the wrong end of the league table then? Take the UK for example, there are currently 129 universities in the league table - those in the top 10 is prestigious whilst any university within the top 40 would be respectable. Anything that, well, it is a race to the bottom and certainly anything beyond 100 is a complete waste of time. So why would anyone want to go to a university that is sitting at or near the bottom of the league table then, given the shame, scorn and humiliation in having such an awful university tarnish your CV? It only takes a minute or so for us to find the league tables online. 

Not all graduates are equal, that's what league tables are for.

Before we go into case studies, let me address an issue that my Singaporean readers will be wondering: are these universities languishing at the bottom of the UK league tables any different from private universities like SIM in Singapore? The key thing is that the league table in the UK only shows public universities - private universities are excluded from the list. There aren't that many of them anyway, but there's nothing to stop British students from obtaining a degree from a private university abroad, such as from SIM if they wanted to. In the UK, a public university receive funding from the government and in exchange, are subject to rules and controls by the government. In contrast, private universities don't get a penny from the government, so they are run like businesses which need to make a profit but they are more free to make their own decisions about how they run themselves. A British public university at the bottom of the league table may receive public money and be subject to government regulation, but as long as they fail to attract quality students, they will always be struggling at the bottom of the league tables. So why would anyone want to get a degree there then when the league tables already tell you that these are terrible universities? Let's meet three very different people who did just that and explore their stories and experiences.

Case study 1: Ms Zhu from Heilongjiang

I got to know Ms Zhu some years back - she was a student at London Metropolitan University then, LMU is currently ranked 127th out of 129 universities and ironically, that is an improvement! For many years, it had sat at the very bottom of the league tables, being officially the worst university in the UK. Ms Zhu had already done her first degree at a decent university in China but was looking to improve her English. Her parents were very rich and could afford to send her to England to study but there was a problem, her English was rather poor and she was worried about the prospect of siting in a lecture theatre, not being able to understand what the hell the white teacher was saying. She had heard that many Chinese students go to LMU and still manage to pass despite not speaking English well. In any case, her first degree was in computer science, but she didn't pursue a career in IT, so she decided to do an MBA at LMU because it seemed general enough. Ms Zhu had been working for a few years in China already, so she knew what she wanted out of this experience: she needed to improve her English, she wanted to learn more about doing business with European people and she wanted to have some fun before she eventually settled down to get married.

One of the worst universities in the UK.

Was she aware of LMU's ranking? Yes she was, did it bother her? No. She told me, "if you go to Heilongjiang and you told people you were studying in England, they may know Oxford and Cambridge, but do they know any other universities? Hell no. They know so little about England, about the UK. They may have heard of London, but ask them to name another city in the UK and they would probably not be able to. So why should I struggle to go do a course at LSE when the people in Heilongjiang don't know the difference between LSE and LMU? They're not like the more sophisticated people in Beijing or Shanghai. If I wanted to settle down here in London, build a career here, work for a British company with British bosses, then sure I would be more concerned about where I got my degree from but I know that is not possible. I want to go home anyway, once I graduate and get back to my family in Heilongjiang. For everything I want to do in China when I get back, a degree from LMU would do, it is enough. I don't want to take a risk by failing an exam and having to repeat a year or a term, my plan was to just do the course, graduate and go home. Let's keep things simple, I know what I am doing. I do have a plan that doesn't require a degree from Oxford."

She went on and gave me an analogy. "In my hometown, my auntie runs a small hotel. And as in all Chinese hotels, she provides some tea bags so the guests can make tea to drink. One day, this salesman came to her hotel and tried to sell my auntie some really expensive Chinese tea, he tried to convince her that any classy hotel would serve their guests very good tea, not the ordinary cheap kind we get from the store. My auntie just laughed at him because she knew it wouldn't make the slightest difference to her business whether she provided ordinary tea or expensive tea in the rooms. She joked that if she gave them very good tea, the guests would take every single teabag with them when they checked out! I feel the same way about my degree - I just need to demonstrate that I have survived the British education system, I can call myself a graduate from an English university. I don't need a posh, fancy degree from a top university - just an ordinary, common one will do me fine, the same way my auntie is happy to settle for the cheapest tea bags for her hotel. Sometimes, it is just not worth it making the extra effort, people just get by with the minimum."

How good is the tea in your hotel room?

Did Ms Zhu achieve everything she wanted? Well, yes I suppose, when you are not very ambitious, it isn't hard for her to do exactly what she wanted. Her English did improve a lot after having spent some time in the UK. She did work part time (that's how I got to know her), so she did get the experience of working with white people. And lastly, yes she did have fun - she had plenty of money, she lived well and since the workload at LMU wasn't too demanding, she had plenty of time for leisure activities. She wasn't dependent on the university to teach her anything she needed for work - no, in fact, the only thing that they furnished her with was her student visa which enabled her to spend some time in the UK. I did question her route though - if she was really that keen to improve her English, then why didn't she do a course in English? Maybe not a degree course, but there were definitely courses she could have done. Heck, she could have done an English course in China! Those would have been more useful for her. She just shrugged her shoulders and didn't have an answer to that. And as for working with white people, surely she could have found work experience in a big city like Shanghai or Beijing - there are plenty of expats there. But she wanted to experience life in the UK and have fun here - a long holiday in England just wouldn't enough for her and she got what she wanted.

Well Ms Zhu graduated and returned to China, she returned to her hometown and soon got married. She has a good job now, she is the business manager dealing with international clients ordering goods made in the local factories - and yes, her English language skills have become extremely useful in this role. However, it was the fact that her English has improved so much that has allowed her to perform her job well - the fact that she studied at LMU is completely irrelevant. Even she told me that back in Heilongjiang, there was just no opportunity to use one's English - watching an American film just wasn't the same as being in a room full of white people and being forced to speak English with them. Her Chinese employers really didn't care what university she studied at whilst she was in England or what the subject was, as long as Ms Zhu could confidently deal with the international clients and provide quality customer service in English. Even she told me that what she studied was a load of rubbish and wasn't useful at all in the real world. But still, she didn't complain - Ms Zhu passed the course and returned home triumphant and content.

Ms Zhu's degree isn't a problem for her in China

Case study 2: David from London

David came from an immigrant family - his mother is from Spain, his father is from Peru and he had spent most of his childhood in Andalucia, in southern Spain. He moved to the UK as a teenager when his mother got a new job in London and thus, English is his second language. David struggled with the British education system because of the language barrier. His parents decided that he should go to a local school and be educated in English, but as a result, he ended up with rather poor A level grades - his only A came in Spanish, but that wasn't enough to get him into any decent university as he didn't want to do a degree in Spanish. He wasn't quite sure what he wanted to do with his career either, he had friends, a social life, he enjoyed sports but for an 18 year old back then, it was a rather tough question to answer. It simply wasn't something he could decide at that age and he had a lot of growing up to do.

His parents decided that going to university would be a good move for David - it was simply a chance for him to grow up, have a taste of living more independently, discovering for himself what he wanted to do with his life so he could embark on a career path. His parents deliberately chose a university in a city far away from London in the north of England, so David would have to live independently as an adult. Unfortunately for him, the only university his grades could get him into was one quite low in the league tables, but the alternative would have been for David to go back into the Spanish education system, do his Spanish Baccalaureate (Bachillerato) and then try to gain entry into a better Spanish university. It was a route with a lot of uncertainty and could take a while. His parents decided that David was ready to grow up, to go to university rather than do the Spanish route which would take too much time. So he settled for the university in the north of England that his parents had chosen for him in spite of the poor ranking in the league tables and ended up doing a computer science course, as his parents believed that it might prove to be very useful.

Studying in a second language can be a huge challenge.

Fast forward a few years, the one major change that happened was David's English had improved dramatically - when he was living at home, he had a Spanish-speaking family environment but when he was at university, he lived amongst English-speaking students and that made a huge impact on his English standard. So like Ms Zhu, even though he didn't study English per se, that was the biggest benefit he gained from going to university. David's parents had a family friend who was involved in a business importing Spanish wine into the UK - quite coincidentally, David's parents were big fans of wine and he grew up being very family with wine. Being now effectively bilingual and armed with his knowledge of wines, he was able to function well in an environment where his skills and knowledge were put to very good use. David worked hard in this company and proved himself a valuable member of the team. He has a good job, he is making decent money and his parents couldn't be happier with the way things have worked out for him.

In David's case, we can see a recurring theme - his parents seemed to have made almost all the major decisions for him. There's nothing wrong with that per se, David has a great relationship with his parents and that's something wonderful to be cherished. I've met his mother and she is a really nice, wonderful person. It was pretty clear what made David stand out from the rest - his ability to speak Spanish and really, whether he got a degree or not really didn't matter. At the age of 18, he was too young and immature to start working and his parents were happy to pay for him to do a degree really just to help give him the space and time to grow up, rather than worry about what he was actually learning about computers at university. David confessed that he did a lot of partying at university and not much studying, but he was at least partying with English students and improving his English at the same time. Furthermore, his current employers really didn't care if he had a degree or not - he didn't need a degree in Spanish to prove that he could speak Spanish fluently, he just opened his mouth and had a conversation in Spanish with the owners of that wine business (who knew his parents well anyway). David is very lucky to have parents who could help him out like that.

David is working in the wine industry today.

Case study 3: Lisa from Norfolk

I thought we'll finish with someone who couldn't be more English - because in the first two case studies, they both clearly improved their English whilst at university. Well Lisa is from a small town in Norfolk and her mother worked at the local supermarket whilst her father worked at the local petrol station. Neither of them were graduates and Lisa was terrified at the prospect of being stuck in a small town as a young person, being faced with very limited employment opportunities. Lisa had a cousin who went to a respectable university and she saw how he left home, started a new life at university, made new friends, had interesting internships and work experiences - when he graduated, he was a changed person and managed to get himself a good job in London. Lisa thought, yeah I'd love to do that too like my cousin. Lisa did badly in her exams though and in her own words, "I could blame my school or my teachers, but the truth was I hated exams, I had chosen the wrong subjects, I was lazy, I wasn't well prepared, I'm not that smart - take your pick, my results were an embarrassment, I did really badly - I can only blame myself, honestly." She realized that with those poor grades, it was really only the universities at the bottom of the league table that would accept her.

Lisa's parents couldn't afford to send her to university in any case - she would be dependent on getting a student loan. In the UK, You only start repaying your loan once you've graduated and you're earning more than £21,000 a year. After that, you'll pay back 9% of anything you earn over £21,000. So if you're earning £26,000 a year, you will need to pay £450 in loan repayments - £37.50 each month. Lisa did the math - she thought she had little to lose, her parents were not earning £21,000 a year in any case and in the worst case scenario, if she ended up like them earning peanuts working lowly paid jobs, then she wouldn't need to have to repay her student loan. More importantly, there wasn't a plan B for Lisa. Her mother once said, "look if it all doesn't work out, don't worry about it. You can always come and work with me at the supermarket - nobody there has a degree and you can stay at home." That thought horrified Lisa - she had always looked forward to growing up, going to university and then getting a good job in the big city, she didn't want to end up like her mother. Lisa knew the university that she eventually settled for was near the bottom of the league tables, but compared to working at the supermarket with her mother, that still felt like a much better option. She really didn't have much of a plan and all she knew was that she wanted to get away from home.

Lisa didn't want to work in a supermarket like her mother.

So Lisa went to LMU to do a business degree, just like Ms Zhu, mostly because she wanted to get away from home and enjoy living in London. However, life in London proved to be quite expensive and even on top of the maintenance loan and grant she obtained, sheknew she had to work part time in order to make ends meet. So she started looking for part time work and a friend told her that she could make quite a lot of money by working as a beauty consultant for a high end cosmetics brand. "You're tall, pretty and have great skin, they would love you. Ugly people can't sell this kind of make up, but you can! Besides, you can earn commissions when you sell a lot of their high-end stuff. Sometimes when they have a new product they're desperate to push, you can get extra generous commissions on it. I recommend various products to the customer that would be right for them, but really I'm just trying to persuade them to spend as much as possible in the shop. Why don't you give it a go? I know they are recruiting." So Lisa joined her friend on the shop floor for a day and saw how her friend oozed natural charm, flattering the customers and persuading them to buy the most expensive cosmetics. Lisa liked the idea of making a lot of money quickly from the commissions so with her friend, she started working part time and enjoyed it. Luckily for her, they had a manager who was a great trainer and Lisa found herself in a good working environment where she felt supported by her manager.

By the end of her first year at university, Lisa realized that she could easily work full time selling cosmetics and her degree was just getting in the way of her work. She didn't need a degree to work what she was doing, she just needed more sleep so she wouldn't feel so exhausted trying to work part time on top of everything she had to do at university. She realized that there wasn't much incentive for her to complete her degree, in fact, she would only be racking up a bigger student loan which she would now have to repay, given that she knew she could easily make more than £21,000 a year if she sold cosmetics full time. "What's the point, I don't need this degree, it is not like it is a degree from Oxford or Cambridge that is going to impress loads of people - it is from LMU of all places," so she decided to cut her losses and drop out of college, in order to work full time. Her employers were more than happy to offer her a full time position, given her impressive sales figures. So Lisa decided to cut her losses, left university after just one year to work full time in her new job. Her colleagues were a mix of graduates and non-graduates, "but it didn't matter - nobody cared about paper qualifications, all that matters was whether you could sell or not and there's no university in the world that can teach you that. I feel lucky to be in an environment where paper qualifications do not really matter."

Money was a huge issue for Lisa.

Did Lisa use make up when she was growing up in her home town in Norfolk? "Not really, my mother discouraged it as she said it was for adults, not teenagers, she thought women who put on a lot of make up were vain. She worked in a supermarket and never wore make up to work as it wasn't practical. Besides, we were poor, she couldn't afford expensive cosmetics, nice clothes, designer jewelry, fancy shoes and things like that. Spending a lot of money on cosmetics just wasn't the done thing in a small town - they got their stuff from the local Boots, so doing this kind of work just never occurred to me until I came to London and saw it for myself. There are women who can walk into the shop and then spend hundreds of pounds - one woman even spent thousands of pounds because she wanted to buy gifts for like her sister, her mother-in-law, her colleagues, her best friend, it was unreal. My mother has come and visited the shop I worked in a couple of times, she is always amazed how much money people could spend on luxuries - but you know, our customers are rich people. They walk into a shop, see something they like and they buy it without considering the price. If you were poor, you wouldn't shop here as you're not going to find any bargains on sale."

Fast forward a few years, Lisa is still working in a central London store for the same cosmetics brand. I asked Lisa if she thought her job was easy. "It depends, I find certain aspects of it easy, but I also find other aspects challenging. I have seen people try this job because they think it is easy, but they get the shock of their lives when they realize that they don't have what it takes and they end up quitting after a few days, sometimes even after a few hours. You have just a few minutes to establish rapport with a customer, gain their trust, to try to persuade them that you know what you're talking about - that you're not just some pushy salesgirl trying to earn some commission by flogging them the most expensive product in the shop. You can't come on too strong or you would scare people off, but you can't be too laid back either or you will fail to engage the client. The knack is to find the perfect balance fast enough, so as to persuade the client to buy the product before she decides to take out her phone to Google cheaper alternatives. You have to be persuasive without being overbearing and you have to know how to read people well. I know when to walk away from a customer who is never going to spend any money with me, oh they can be friendly and want to chat but it is pointless if they don't wanna buy anything. Maybe one day I'd like to go on to sell something else, of greater value, to move onto high end luxury sales, but I am making good money for now and am happy enough doing what I do."

Lipstick, anyone?

I asked Lisa if she has any regrets not completing her degree - if she would consider going back to do a degree one day. Perhaps, a different one, one that would be directly relevant to the cosmetics industry that would further her career. "What can I study?" She asked me. "I don't need a degree in like chemistry or pharmaceuticals - I'm not making the stuff we sell in the shop, I don't need to understand how our products are made; I need to explain to the customer why it is right for her skin and that has nothing to do with the science behind the product. You can't get scientific with customers about the product, you have to connect with them emotionally, appeal to their vanity and insecurities to convince them that this is the product they need and want. Business degrees are a waste of time - they are so general, I need to learn product-specific information that will allow me to do my job better, not the kind of general principles that they teach in university. My employers have a good training programme, I am constantly supported and sent for different kinds of training - they are good like that, they invest in people, they hold on to their best staff and treat us well. I'm earning and learning at the same time, why would that give that up for a degree that wouldn't be that useful to me? In hindsight, I should have just had the confidence to move to London to find a job rather than bother with LMU. Hindsight is 2020. I was young and inexperienced then, I didn't know what I was doing."

So, what are the conclusions?

In all three cases we have explored, Zhu, David and Lisa have all managed to get good jobs in spite of having gone to a crap university - however, in all three cases, none of them depended on their degree per se to get their jobs. Zhu and David needed to improve their English and their family connections ensured that they had good jobs waiting for them when they graduated. In the case of Lisa, being in London simply opened her eyes to the opportunities that were not available to her back in her hometown and it enabled her to meet the right people who would eventually employ her. Lisa's financial situation meant that she had to make the strategic decision to cut her losses and quit university after just one year, whilst Zhu and David had the luxury of having their parents' financial support whilst they had fun at university without worrying about money. The moral of the story? If you have a rich and influential family, then life is a lot easier - and yes, life isn't fair, I hope you got that memo. By all means turn to your family and ask for help! But even in the case of Lisa, her parents were very poor but she still made the best of the opportunities that she was given in life and is doing very well for herself today. If any of them had depended on their degrees to try to find a job however, they would all be in big trouble as they would not get past any gatekeeper with their academic records. Your time in university is what you make of it - thankfully, all three of them managed to do a lot more than just study for their exams and managed to find some benefit from their time at university, despite the truly terrible rankings of their universities.

What do you think? Have you met people like Zhu, David or Lisa? Leave a comment below, many thanks for reading.