How do British universities really work, from UCAS and conditional offers to Freshers’ Week, student loans, and Scotland’s fees?
In this episode, you'll learn about how British universities really work.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it’s part two of our three-part mini-series on the theme of “university”.
[00:00:29] In case you missed part one, it was on the history of the university, from its earliest days in medieval Europe, through to the colossal industry it is today.
[00:00:40] Next up, in part three, we’ll be looking at the scandal of Trump University, the university that, legally speaking, is no longer allowed to call itself a university.
[00:00:51] But today we will be talking about universities in the UK.
[00:00:56] How do they work, how are they different from universities in other countries, and what is life like at university in Britain?
[00:01:04] Perhaps surprisingly, I’ve had many requests to make this sort of episode, often from people who are considering applying to study at a British university.
[00:01:15] So if this is you, I hope it’ll be interesting, and even if you have absolutely no intention of ever studying at a British university, I hope it’ll be interesting nonetheless.
[00:01:27] OK then, with that out of the way, let’s get right into it.
[00:01:33] It is a perfectly reasonable statement to say that, as far as its place on the world stage goes, the UK is not what it once was.
[00:01:43] From global politics to economic power, the UK is clearly less important than at almost any stage in the past 500 years or so.
[00:01:54] However, there is one area in which the UK still packs a sizable punch: higher education. Its universities.
[00:02:04] Out of the top 10 universities worldwide, according to the most recent QS World University Rankings, the UK has four.
[00:02:15] The US has another four, and the remaining two are ETH Zurich, in Switzerland, and the National University of Singapore.
[00:02:24] The UK is home to some of the best universities in the world, and the 150 or so universities in the UK educate almost 3 million students every year. To put it another way, one out of every 23 people in the UK is currently enrolled at a university, and according to the most recent census, 1 in 3 adults in the UK has a university degree.
[00:02:55] I am one of them, and in fact, I have degrees from two different British universities, so in this episode, I will talk you through what it is like to study at a British university more generally, as well as share my own experience.
[00:03:12] So, let’s start at the beginning, and here I’ll give you some background to how education works in the UK.
[00:03:21] In the UK, education is compulsory up until the year you turn 18.
[00:03:28] But it’s compulsory with a caveat, an exception.
[00:03:33] When you are 15 or 16, most people take exams called General Certificate of Secondary Education, or GCSEs for short.
[00:03:45] Some subjects are compulsory, like English and Maths, but there is an element of choice, so not everyone needs to study drama or French or philosophy, or things that are deemed less vital.
[00:04:02] You can leave the traditional school system after this, but technically you need to enrol in some form of training: an apprenticeship or something like that.
[00:04:15] If you want to go to university, you have to continue for two more years and study for your A-levels. 86% of people do this, according to the latest government data.
[00:04:29] Here, you drop a bunch of subjects that you would have studied for your GCSEs, and you only choose your favourites, the ones you are best at, or perhaps the ones your parents insist you must do.
[00:04:44] Most students choose three or four subjects, and it’s already at this point that a student needs to be thinking about what they might want to study at university.
[00:04:58] In your final year at school, so the year you turn 18, you need to start the application process.
[00:05:06] In Britain, this all happens through a centralised system called the UCAS, which stands for the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service. Essentially UCAS is a middleman, and allows you to apply to up to five universities in one go, all together.
[00:05:26] You don’t write to every university individually.
[00:05:30] Now, not every university has every course, and some universities are particularly well-known for certain courses and weaker in others.
[00:05:41] So, there is typically someone at your school who will help you figure out whether university is right for you, which courses could be a good fit, which universities to apply for, and generally guide you through the application process.
[00:05:58] So, you choose your five universities and the courses you’d like to apply for.
[00:06:04] In terms of how the application process works, your school includes your grades so far, as well as your predicted grades at A-Level, your predicted final grades.
[00:06:17] Of course, there are all of your personal details, and then the other important bit is the personal statement.
[00:06:25] This is a single essay, up to 4,000 characters long, so roughly one side of A4, where you have to explain why you want to study that subject, what makes you suitable, and what wider reading or experiences you’ve had.
[00:06:45] Alongside a written reference from your teachers, essentially a letter of recommendation, and your predicted grades for your A-levels, then this is all sent off to your chosen universities.
[00:07:00] Then you…wait.
[00:07:03] The most selective universities also require you to come and have a series of interviews.
[00:07:09] In my case, I applied for Oxford, University College London–or UCL–Bristol, Exeter, and I think Manchester was the last one.
[00:07:21] I was invited to interviews at both Oxford and UCL, where I was grilled on my motivations to study there, asked about things I’d included in my personal statement, and so on.
[00:07:34] My interviews at Oxford didn’t go very well, but my interviews at UCL did go pretty well.
[00:07:41] And sure enough, I was offered a place at UCL, but not by Oxford, thank you, but no thank you, I was told.
[00:07:50] The other universities, which were still good but not ranked quite as highly as Oxford and UCL, didn’t ask me for an interview, but offered me a place in any case.
[00:08:02] And here is a peculiarity of UK universities, or that might be different to how university works in your country: the place you are given is usually conditional.
[00:08:16] That means the university will say, “We will give you a place on this course, but only if you get these grades in your final A-level exams.”
[00:08:27] And if you have multiple offers, they might have different grade requirements.
[00:08:33] So you might have an offer from UCL that says you need to get three As, or one from Bristol that says you need two As and a B, but you need to get an A in a particular subject.
[00:08:45] When the exam results come out in August, if you get the grades, your place is confirmed.
[00:08:53] If you don’t, you may lose your spot, but there is a system called Clearing that matches students with universities that have spaces available.
[00:09:03] And what happens if you don’t get any offers from your chosen universities?
[00:09:08] Well, this should be quite unlikely. Someone at your school should have advised you on the types of universities to apply for, given your grades.
[00:09:21] If you have excellent grades, then you should be encouraged to apply for the best universities, and if your grades are not so good, then you should be pushed towards universities that are more likely to accept you.
[00:09:35] So, you’ve got your offer, you’ve got the required grades, and you’re ready to go.
[00:09:41] Most British students move away from home to go to university; it’s unlike many European countries, where most students will go to the closest university and still live at home.
[00:09:56] In the UK, people typically move away from home and will spend their first year in what’s called a “halls of residence”, essentially a large building with a mixture of single and double rooms, depending on the university.
[00:10:12] And as to what life is like in one of these halls of residence, well, if you put 500 or so British 18-year-olds in a building together, many of whom have never left home and who might have just received their first batch of their student loans, well, I’m sure you can imagine a little of what life might be like.
[00:10:35] And on that subject, we must talk about finances.
[00:10:39] As you may know already, or might remember from the last episode, there are some quite hefty tuition fees at British universities.
[00:10:49] University was completely free until 1997, then it was £1,000 a year, which was what I was lucky enough to pay, then it was increased to £3,000 for applications after 2004, and then increased again to £9,000 in 2012.
[00:11:09] Interestingly and importantly, Scotland is different; if you are from Scotland, your home is in Scotland, the Scottish government pays for your university fees, if you go to a Scottish university.
[00:11:24] If you go to an English university, you pay the standard English tuition fees, and people from England going to Scottish universities have to pay the standard tuition fees, they don’t get free tuition.
[00:11:40] So most students from Scotland stay in Scotland for university, because they save on the fees.
[00:11:48] And as for international students, well, the sky is the limit in terms of fees. There is no government cap, so universities are free to charge as much as they like.
[00:12:01] For example, if you are an international student and you’d like to study medicine at Cambridge, it will cost you £58,000 a year, so that’s €66,000.
[00:12:16] I’ll be talking about domestic, British students here, but that’s how it works for international students, as a point of comparison.
[00:12:25] Living costs are a separate thing altogether, and most students will take out a loan from the government, from a government-owned not-for-profit organisation that gives out what are called maintenance loans to students.
[00:12:40] OK, so we’ve arrived at university, found our halls of residence, paid for our course and got our first loan payment. What next?
[00:12:50] All universities will have something called “freshers week”, which is basically a huge party week for all new undergraduate students, freshmen, or freshers for short.
[00:13:03] And then begins the actual business of studying.
[00:13:07] Most undergraduate courses are three years, some are four, and more specialised ones like medicine take 5 or 6, with additional specialisations taking even longer. One of my best friends from university specialised in neuroscience, and he has only just technically finished his studies.
[00:13:29] And we both started in 2006.
[00:13:33] An important distinction between British universities and universities elsewhere, for example in the US, is that in the UK you start your course immediately; you don’t take a series of general modules in your first year and later decide what you specialise in.
[00:13:53] You apply for a course, in my case, French and Italian, and within that course, there are certain modules you can take: Dante or 19th century French literature, for example.
[00:14:07] You can’t apply for History and then decide you’d like to take a module on advanced statistics or microbiology. You’d have to drop out of the course, reapply, and start it all over again.
[00:14:22] Another peculiarity of many British university courses is that there really isn’t that much time spent in lectures, in class.
[00:14:32] I think I had around 10 hours of lectures per week for my class. It might not sound like much at all, especially if you are paying €10,000 a year for the privilege, but the expectation is that you do a lot of self-study and reading around the subject in the remaining time.
[00:14:55] Of course, not every university is the same, but especially at the more selective universities, a lot of your time will be spent reading and studying on your own, and then your contact time with a professor will be spent in discussion, and you are expected to have done extensive preparation beforehand.
[00:15:18] As part of my university studies, I did an ERASMUS exchange and studied at university both in Lyon, in France, and Naples, in Italy, and I had considerably more contact time with professors in both places, but it was a very different style of teaching; much more based on the professor standing in front of a large group of students and imparting their knowledge to them rather than my experience at UCL, which was much more collaborative: small groups, back and forth discussion, and more work out of the classroom than in.
[00:15:59] So, that may or may not be different from what university is typically like in your country.
[00:16:07] Another potential difference is that in the UK, at most universities at least, most modules run all the time. In other words, you will be doing all of your modules at the same time, slowly over the course of the year.
[00:16:25] My wife is a lecturer at a university in Sweden, and with her course, students take one module at a time very intensively, so every day there will be a lecture or some form of tuition, but only for a period of a few weeks, before they move on to another.
[00:16:47] So, let’s move forward with our studies. Depending on the course, students will have a mixture of ongoing coursework and exams at the end of the year.
[00:16:58] In my case, it was almost all exam-based. My course was four years, which included a year spent studying abroad, and each year counted progressively more towards my final mark.
[00:17:13] The first year was 10%, the second 15%, the third another 15%, and the final year 60%. Or something like that, and of course, every university and course will be slightly different.
[00:17:30] And on the subject of marks, the UK has a very specific grading system.
[00:17:38] The top mark is a “first class” degree, which is anything over 70.
[00:17:45] Then you can have an “upper second class” degree, or 2:1, which is a mark in the 60s, a “lower class” degree, a 2:2, which is in the 50s, or a third class degree, which is in the 40s.
[00:18:01] Now, you might be listening to this and thinking, “Hang on, you only need to get a mark of 70 to get the top grade?”
[00:18:09] In many university systems, students get almost full marks, like an Italian getting 30 out of 30 or an American getting a GPA of 4.0. If your university was like this, I can imagine a mark of 70 sounds like nothing to write home about, nothing particularly special.
[00:18:31] Not in the UK. When I graduated, only around 10% of people got 70 and above. Around half got an “upper second class” degree, which is what I got, and the rest got lower second class or third class degrees.
[00:18:49] So getting a mark above 70 is not easy, and it’s incredibly rare for a student to get above 80.
[00:18:58] In my year, nobody got a mark of above 80, and this has included people who have gone on to teach at places like Cambridge and Yale.
[00:19:08] OK, so we have now graduated from a British university, well done us!
[00:19:14] What next?
[00:19:15] Well, the real world of gainful employment is waiting for us, or you might choose to continue studying. In my case, I did a Master’s degree, partly because I had become particularly interested in China and in learning Mandarin, and partly because I didn’t have a concrete idea of what I wanted to do next.
[00:19:37] I went to a different university for my Master’s; I went to one called SOAS, which is a specialist university for Oriental and African studies, still in London.
[00:19:50] And in terms of my experience, it was slightly different to undergraduate, in that the studying aspect was taken more seriously, but the overall format and style were similar.
[00:20:05] So, to wrap things up, I spent five years of my life at university, and enjoyed almost every minute of it.
[00:20:13] I was lucky enough to go to a very good university, one of those four in the UK that rank among the top 10 in the world.
[00:20:22] Of course, university isn’t the right choice for everyone, and many British universities rightly come under criticism for offering expensive degrees that don’t deliver good value for money.
[00:20:34] For me, it was a great choice, and one I would make again in a heartbeat.
[00:20:41] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on British Universities.
[00:20:45] I hope it's been an interesting one, no matter whether you are a budding 17-year-old thinking about applying to a British university or you are 77 years old and you can think of nothing worse than spending Fresher’s Week at a British university.
[00:20:59] If you are interested in learning more about British universities, we have a couple more episodes that might be interesting: episode number 276 is all about Oxbridge [that's Oxford and Cambridge universities], and episode 513 is all about the UK university crisis. I’ll put a link to both of those in the description.
[00:21:21] And as a quick reminder, this was part two of our three-part mini-series on the theme of university.
[00:21:27] In case you missed part one, we talked about the history of university in general, and next up, it’ll be the sordid and scammy history of Trump University.
[00:21:38] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:21:43] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it’s part two of our three-part mini-series on the theme of “university”.
[00:00:29] In case you missed part one, it was on the history of the university, from its earliest days in medieval Europe, through to the colossal industry it is today.
[00:00:40] Next up, in part three, we’ll be looking at the scandal of Trump University, the university that, legally speaking, is no longer allowed to call itself a university.
[00:00:51] But today we will be talking about universities in the UK.
[00:00:56] How do they work, how are they different from universities in other countries, and what is life like at university in Britain?
[00:01:04] Perhaps surprisingly, I’ve had many requests to make this sort of episode, often from people who are considering applying to study at a British university.
[00:01:15] So if this is you, I hope it’ll be interesting, and even if you have absolutely no intention of ever studying at a British university, I hope it’ll be interesting nonetheless.
[00:01:27] OK then, with that out of the way, let’s get right into it.
[00:01:33] It is a perfectly reasonable statement to say that, as far as its place on the world stage goes, the UK is not what it once was.
[00:01:43] From global politics to economic power, the UK is clearly less important than at almost any stage in the past 500 years or so.
[00:01:54] However, there is one area in which the UK still packs a sizable punch: higher education. Its universities.
[00:02:04] Out of the top 10 universities worldwide, according to the most recent QS World University Rankings, the UK has four.
[00:02:15] The US has another four, and the remaining two are ETH Zurich, in Switzerland, and the National University of Singapore.
[00:02:24] The UK is home to some of the best universities in the world, and the 150 or so universities in the UK educate almost 3 million students every year. To put it another way, one out of every 23 people in the UK is currently enrolled at a university, and according to the most recent census, 1 in 3 adults in the UK has a university degree.
[00:02:55] I am one of them, and in fact, I have degrees from two different British universities, so in this episode, I will talk you through what it is like to study at a British university more generally, as well as share my own experience.
[00:03:12] So, let’s start at the beginning, and here I’ll give you some background to how education works in the UK.
[00:03:21] In the UK, education is compulsory up until the year you turn 18.
[00:03:28] But it’s compulsory with a caveat, an exception.
[00:03:33] When you are 15 or 16, most people take exams called General Certificate of Secondary Education, or GCSEs for short.
[00:03:45] Some subjects are compulsory, like English and Maths, but there is an element of choice, so not everyone needs to study drama or French or philosophy, or things that are deemed less vital.
[00:04:02] You can leave the traditional school system after this, but technically you need to enrol in some form of training: an apprenticeship or something like that.
[00:04:15] If you want to go to university, you have to continue for two more years and study for your A-levels. 86% of people do this, according to the latest government data.
[00:04:29] Here, you drop a bunch of subjects that you would have studied for your GCSEs, and you only choose your favourites, the ones you are best at, or perhaps the ones your parents insist you must do.
[00:04:44] Most students choose three or four subjects, and it’s already at this point that a student needs to be thinking about what they might want to study at university.
[00:04:58] In your final year at school, so the year you turn 18, you need to start the application process.
[00:05:06] In Britain, this all happens through a centralised system called the UCAS, which stands for the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service. Essentially UCAS is a middleman, and allows you to apply to up to five universities in one go, all together.
[00:05:26] You don’t write to every university individually.
[00:05:30] Now, not every university has every course, and some universities are particularly well-known for certain courses and weaker in others.
[00:05:41] So, there is typically someone at your school who will help you figure out whether university is right for you, which courses could be a good fit, which universities to apply for, and generally guide you through the application process.
[00:05:58] So, you choose your five universities and the courses you’d like to apply for.
[00:06:04] In terms of how the application process works, your school includes your grades so far, as well as your predicted grades at A-Level, your predicted final grades.
[00:06:17] Of course, there are all of your personal details, and then the other important bit is the personal statement.
[00:06:25] This is a single essay, up to 4,000 characters long, so roughly one side of A4, where you have to explain why you want to study that subject, what makes you suitable, and what wider reading or experiences you’ve had.
[00:06:45] Alongside a written reference from your teachers, essentially a letter of recommendation, and your predicted grades for your A-levels, then this is all sent off to your chosen universities.
[00:07:00] Then you…wait.
[00:07:03] The most selective universities also require you to come and have a series of interviews.
[00:07:09] In my case, I applied for Oxford, University College London–or UCL–Bristol, Exeter, and I think Manchester was the last one.
[00:07:21] I was invited to interviews at both Oxford and UCL, where I was grilled on my motivations to study there, asked about things I’d included in my personal statement, and so on.
[00:07:34] My interviews at Oxford didn’t go very well, but my interviews at UCL did go pretty well.
[00:07:41] And sure enough, I was offered a place at UCL, but not by Oxford, thank you, but no thank you, I was told.
[00:07:50] The other universities, which were still good but not ranked quite as highly as Oxford and UCL, didn’t ask me for an interview, but offered me a place in any case.
[00:08:02] And here is a peculiarity of UK universities, or that might be different to how university works in your country: the place you are given is usually conditional.
[00:08:16] That means the university will say, “We will give you a place on this course, but only if you get these grades in your final A-level exams.”
[00:08:27] And if you have multiple offers, they might have different grade requirements.
[00:08:33] So you might have an offer from UCL that says you need to get three As, or one from Bristol that says you need two As and a B, but you need to get an A in a particular subject.
[00:08:45] When the exam results come out in August, if you get the grades, your place is confirmed.
[00:08:53] If you don’t, you may lose your spot, but there is a system called Clearing that matches students with universities that have spaces available.
[00:09:03] And what happens if you don’t get any offers from your chosen universities?
[00:09:08] Well, this should be quite unlikely. Someone at your school should have advised you on the types of universities to apply for, given your grades.
[00:09:21] If you have excellent grades, then you should be encouraged to apply for the best universities, and if your grades are not so good, then you should be pushed towards universities that are more likely to accept you.
[00:09:35] So, you’ve got your offer, you’ve got the required grades, and you’re ready to go.
[00:09:41] Most British students move away from home to go to university; it’s unlike many European countries, where most students will go to the closest university and still live at home.
[00:09:56] In the UK, people typically move away from home and will spend their first year in what’s called a “halls of residence”, essentially a large building with a mixture of single and double rooms, depending on the university.
[00:10:12] And as to what life is like in one of these halls of residence, well, if you put 500 or so British 18-year-olds in a building together, many of whom have never left home and who might have just received their first batch of their student loans, well, I’m sure you can imagine a little of what life might be like.
[00:10:35] And on that subject, we must talk about finances.
[00:10:39] As you may know already, or might remember from the last episode, there are some quite hefty tuition fees at British universities.
[00:10:49] University was completely free until 1997, then it was £1,000 a year, which was what I was lucky enough to pay, then it was increased to £3,000 for applications after 2004, and then increased again to £9,000 in 2012.
[00:11:09] Interestingly and importantly, Scotland is different; if you are from Scotland, your home is in Scotland, the Scottish government pays for your university fees, if you go to a Scottish university.
[00:11:24] If you go to an English university, you pay the standard English tuition fees, and people from England going to Scottish universities have to pay the standard tuition fees, they don’t get free tuition.
[00:11:40] So most students from Scotland stay in Scotland for university, because they save on the fees.
[00:11:48] And as for international students, well, the sky is the limit in terms of fees. There is no government cap, so universities are free to charge as much as they like.
[00:12:01] For example, if you are an international student and you’d like to study medicine at Cambridge, it will cost you £58,000 a year, so that’s €66,000.
[00:12:16] I’ll be talking about domestic, British students here, but that’s how it works for international students, as a point of comparison.
[00:12:25] Living costs are a separate thing altogether, and most students will take out a loan from the government, from a government-owned not-for-profit organisation that gives out what are called maintenance loans to students.
[00:12:40] OK, so we’ve arrived at university, found our halls of residence, paid for our course and got our first loan payment. What next?
[00:12:50] All universities will have something called “freshers week”, which is basically a huge party week for all new undergraduate students, freshmen, or freshers for short.
[00:13:03] And then begins the actual business of studying.
[00:13:07] Most undergraduate courses are three years, some are four, and more specialised ones like medicine take 5 or 6, with additional specialisations taking even longer. One of my best friends from university specialised in neuroscience, and he has only just technically finished his studies.
[00:13:29] And we both started in 2006.
[00:13:33] An important distinction between British universities and universities elsewhere, for example in the US, is that in the UK you start your course immediately; you don’t take a series of general modules in your first year and later decide what you specialise in.
[00:13:53] You apply for a course, in my case, French and Italian, and within that course, there are certain modules you can take: Dante or 19th century French literature, for example.
[00:14:07] You can’t apply for History and then decide you’d like to take a module on advanced statistics or microbiology. You’d have to drop out of the course, reapply, and start it all over again.
[00:14:22] Another peculiarity of many British university courses is that there really isn’t that much time spent in lectures, in class.
[00:14:32] I think I had around 10 hours of lectures per week for my class. It might not sound like much at all, especially if you are paying €10,000 a year for the privilege, but the expectation is that you do a lot of self-study and reading around the subject in the remaining time.
[00:14:55] Of course, not every university is the same, but especially at the more selective universities, a lot of your time will be spent reading and studying on your own, and then your contact time with a professor will be spent in discussion, and you are expected to have done extensive preparation beforehand.
[00:15:18] As part of my university studies, I did an ERASMUS exchange and studied at university both in Lyon, in France, and Naples, in Italy, and I had considerably more contact time with professors in both places, but it was a very different style of teaching; much more based on the professor standing in front of a large group of students and imparting their knowledge to them rather than my experience at UCL, which was much more collaborative: small groups, back and forth discussion, and more work out of the classroom than in.
[00:15:59] So, that may or may not be different from what university is typically like in your country.
[00:16:07] Another potential difference is that in the UK, at most universities at least, most modules run all the time. In other words, you will be doing all of your modules at the same time, slowly over the course of the year.
[00:16:25] My wife is a lecturer at a university in Sweden, and with her course, students take one module at a time very intensively, so every day there will be a lecture or some form of tuition, but only for a period of a few weeks, before they move on to another.
[00:16:47] So, let’s move forward with our studies. Depending on the course, students will have a mixture of ongoing coursework and exams at the end of the year.
[00:16:58] In my case, it was almost all exam-based. My course was four years, which included a year spent studying abroad, and each year counted progressively more towards my final mark.
[00:17:13] The first year was 10%, the second 15%, the third another 15%, and the final year 60%. Or something like that, and of course, every university and course will be slightly different.
[00:17:30] And on the subject of marks, the UK has a very specific grading system.
[00:17:38] The top mark is a “first class” degree, which is anything over 70.
[00:17:45] Then you can have an “upper second class” degree, or 2:1, which is a mark in the 60s, a “lower class” degree, a 2:2, which is in the 50s, or a third class degree, which is in the 40s.
[00:18:01] Now, you might be listening to this and thinking, “Hang on, you only need to get a mark of 70 to get the top grade?”
[00:18:09] In many university systems, students get almost full marks, like an Italian getting 30 out of 30 or an American getting a GPA of 4.0. If your university was like this, I can imagine a mark of 70 sounds like nothing to write home about, nothing particularly special.
[00:18:31] Not in the UK. When I graduated, only around 10% of people got 70 and above. Around half got an “upper second class” degree, which is what I got, and the rest got lower second class or third class degrees.
[00:18:49] So getting a mark above 70 is not easy, and it’s incredibly rare for a student to get above 80.
[00:18:58] In my year, nobody got a mark of above 80, and this has included people who have gone on to teach at places like Cambridge and Yale.
[00:19:08] OK, so we have now graduated from a British university, well done us!
[00:19:14] What next?
[00:19:15] Well, the real world of gainful employment is waiting for us, or you might choose to continue studying. In my case, I did a Master’s degree, partly because I had become particularly interested in China and in learning Mandarin, and partly because I didn’t have a concrete idea of what I wanted to do next.
[00:19:37] I went to a different university for my Master’s; I went to one called SOAS, which is a specialist university for Oriental and African studies, still in London.
[00:19:50] And in terms of my experience, it was slightly different to undergraduate, in that the studying aspect was taken more seriously, but the overall format and style were similar.
[00:20:05] So, to wrap things up, I spent five years of my life at university, and enjoyed almost every minute of it.
[00:20:13] I was lucky enough to go to a very good university, one of those four in the UK that rank among the top 10 in the world.
[00:20:22] Of course, university isn’t the right choice for everyone, and many British universities rightly come under criticism for offering expensive degrees that don’t deliver good value for money.
[00:20:34] For me, it was a great choice, and one I would make again in a heartbeat.
[00:20:41] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on British Universities.
[00:20:45] I hope it's been an interesting one, no matter whether you are a budding 17-year-old thinking about applying to a British university or you are 77 years old and you can think of nothing worse than spending Fresher’s Week at a British university.
[00:20:59] If you are interested in learning more about British universities, we have a couple more episodes that might be interesting: episode number 276 is all about Oxbridge [that's Oxford and Cambridge universities], and episode 513 is all about the UK university crisis. I’ll put a link to both of those in the description.
[00:21:21] And as a quick reminder, this was part two of our three-part mini-series on the theme of university.
[00:21:27] In case you missed part one, we talked about the history of university in general, and next up, it’ll be the sordid and scammy history of Trump University.
[00:21:38] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:21:43] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it’s part two of our three-part mini-series on the theme of “university”.
[00:00:29] In case you missed part one, it was on the history of the university, from its earliest days in medieval Europe, through to the colossal industry it is today.
[00:00:40] Next up, in part three, we’ll be looking at the scandal of Trump University, the university that, legally speaking, is no longer allowed to call itself a university.
[00:00:51] But today we will be talking about universities in the UK.
[00:00:56] How do they work, how are they different from universities in other countries, and what is life like at university in Britain?
[00:01:04] Perhaps surprisingly, I’ve had many requests to make this sort of episode, often from people who are considering applying to study at a British university.
[00:01:15] So if this is you, I hope it’ll be interesting, and even if you have absolutely no intention of ever studying at a British university, I hope it’ll be interesting nonetheless.
[00:01:27] OK then, with that out of the way, let’s get right into it.
[00:01:33] It is a perfectly reasonable statement to say that, as far as its place on the world stage goes, the UK is not what it once was.
[00:01:43] From global politics to economic power, the UK is clearly less important than at almost any stage in the past 500 years or so.
[00:01:54] However, there is one area in which the UK still packs a sizable punch: higher education. Its universities.
[00:02:04] Out of the top 10 universities worldwide, according to the most recent QS World University Rankings, the UK has four.
[00:02:15] The US has another four, and the remaining two are ETH Zurich, in Switzerland, and the National University of Singapore.
[00:02:24] The UK is home to some of the best universities in the world, and the 150 or so universities in the UK educate almost 3 million students every year. To put it another way, one out of every 23 people in the UK is currently enrolled at a university, and according to the most recent census, 1 in 3 adults in the UK has a university degree.
[00:02:55] I am one of them, and in fact, I have degrees from two different British universities, so in this episode, I will talk you through what it is like to study at a British university more generally, as well as share my own experience.
[00:03:12] So, let’s start at the beginning, and here I’ll give you some background to how education works in the UK.
[00:03:21] In the UK, education is compulsory up until the year you turn 18.
[00:03:28] But it’s compulsory with a caveat, an exception.
[00:03:33] When you are 15 or 16, most people take exams called General Certificate of Secondary Education, or GCSEs for short.
[00:03:45] Some subjects are compulsory, like English and Maths, but there is an element of choice, so not everyone needs to study drama or French or philosophy, or things that are deemed less vital.
[00:04:02] You can leave the traditional school system after this, but technically you need to enrol in some form of training: an apprenticeship or something like that.
[00:04:15] If you want to go to university, you have to continue for two more years and study for your A-levels. 86% of people do this, according to the latest government data.
[00:04:29] Here, you drop a bunch of subjects that you would have studied for your GCSEs, and you only choose your favourites, the ones you are best at, or perhaps the ones your parents insist you must do.
[00:04:44] Most students choose three or four subjects, and it’s already at this point that a student needs to be thinking about what they might want to study at university.
[00:04:58] In your final year at school, so the year you turn 18, you need to start the application process.
[00:05:06] In Britain, this all happens through a centralised system called the UCAS, which stands for the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service. Essentially UCAS is a middleman, and allows you to apply to up to five universities in one go, all together.
[00:05:26] You don’t write to every university individually.
[00:05:30] Now, not every university has every course, and some universities are particularly well-known for certain courses and weaker in others.
[00:05:41] So, there is typically someone at your school who will help you figure out whether university is right for you, which courses could be a good fit, which universities to apply for, and generally guide you through the application process.
[00:05:58] So, you choose your five universities and the courses you’d like to apply for.
[00:06:04] In terms of how the application process works, your school includes your grades so far, as well as your predicted grades at A-Level, your predicted final grades.
[00:06:17] Of course, there are all of your personal details, and then the other important bit is the personal statement.
[00:06:25] This is a single essay, up to 4,000 characters long, so roughly one side of A4, where you have to explain why you want to study that subject, what makes you suitable, and what wider reading or experiences you’ve had.
[00:06:45] Alongside a written reference from your teachers, essentially a letter of recommendation, and your predicted grades for your A-levels, then this is all sent off to your chosen universities.
[00:07:00] Then you…wait.
[00:07:03] The most selective universities also require you to come and have a series of interviews.
[00:07:09] In my case, I applied for Oxford, University College London–or UCL–Bristol, Exeter, and I think Manchester was the last one.
[00:07:21] I was invited to interviews at both Oxford and UCL, where I was grilled on my motivations to study there, asked about things I’d included in my personal statement, and so on.
[00:07:34] My interviews at Oxford didn’t go very well, but my interviews at UCL did go pretty well.
[00:07:41] And sure enough, I was offered a place at UCL, but not by Oxford, thank you, but no thank you, I was told.
[00:07:50] The other universities, which were still good but not ranked quite as highly as Oxford and UCL, didn’t ask me for an interview, but offered me a place in any case.
[00:08:02] And here is a peculiarity of UK universities, or that might be different to how university works in your country: the place you are given is usually conditional.
[00:08:16] That means the university will say, “We will give you a place on this course, but only if you get these grades in your final A-level exams.”
[00:08:27] And if you have multiple offers, they might have different grade requirements.
[00:08:33] So you might have an offer from UCL that says you need to get three As, or one from Bristol that says you need two As and a B, but you need to get an A in a particular subject.
[00:08:45] When the exam results come out in August, if you get the grades, your place is confirmed.
[00:08:53] If you don’t, you may lose your spot, but there is a system called Clearing that matches students with universities that have spaces available.
[00:09:03] And what happens if you don’t get any offers from your chosen universities?
[00:09:08] Well, this should be quite unlikely. Someone at your school should have advised you on the types of universities to apply for, given your grades.
[00:09:21] If you have excellent grades, then you should be encouraged to apply for the best universities, and if your grades are not so good, then you should be pushed towards universities that are more likely to accept you.
[00:09:35] So, you’ve got your offer, you’ve got the required grades, and you’re ready to go.
[00:09:41] Most British students move away from home to go to university; it’s unlike many European countries, where most students will go to the closest university and still live at home.
[00:09:56] In the UK, people typically move away from home and will spend their first year in what’s called a “halls of residence”, essentially a large building with a mixture of single and double rooms, depending on the university.
[00:10:12] And as to what life is like in one of these halls of residence, well, if you put 500 or so British 18-year-olds in a building together, many of whom have never left home and who might have just received their first batch of their student loans, well, I’m sure you can imagine a little of what life might be like.
[00:10:35] And on that subject, we must talk about finances.
[00:10:39] As you may know already, or might remember from the last episode, there are some quite hefty tuition fees at British universities.
[00:10:49] University was completely free until 1997, then it was £1,000 a year, which was what I was lucky enough to pay, then it was increased to £3,000 for applications after 2004, and then increased again to £9,000 in 2012.
[00:11:09] Interestingly and importantly, Scotland is different; if you are from Scotland, your home is in Scotland, the Scottish government pays for your university fees, if you go to a Scottish university.
[00:11:24] If you go to an English university, you pay the standard English tuition fees, and people from England going to Scottish universities have to pay the standard tuition fees, they don’t get free tuition.
[00:11:40] So most students from Scotland stay in Scotland for university, because they save on the fees.
[00:11:48] And as for international students, well, the sky is the limit in terms of fees. There is no government cap, so universities are free to charge as much as they like.
[00:12:01] For example, if you are an international student and you’d like to study medicine at Cambridge, it will cost you £58,000 a year, so that’s €66,000.
[00:12:16] I’ll be talking about domestic, British students here, but that’s how it works for international students, as a point of comparison.
[00:12:25] Living costs are a separate thing altogether, and most students will take out a loan from the government, from a government-owned not-for-profit organisation that gives out what are called maintenance loans to students.
[00:12:40] OK, so we’ve arrived at university, found our halls of residence, paid for our course and got our first loan payment. What next?
[00:12:50] All universities will have something called “freshers week”, which is basically a huge party week for all new undergraduate students, freshmen, or freshers for short.
[00:13:03] And then begins the actual business of studying.
[00:13:07] Most undergraduate courses are three years, some are four, and more specialised ones like medicine take 5 or 6, with additional specialisations taking even longer. One of my best friends from university specialised in neuroscience, and he has only just technically finished his studies.
[00:13:29] And we both started in 2006.
[00:13:33] An important distinction between British universities and universities elsewhere, for example in the US, is that in the UK you start your course immediately; you don’t take a series of general modules in your first year and later decide what you specialise in.
[00:13:53] You apply for a course, in my case, French and Italian, and within that course, there are certain modules you can take: Dante or 19th century French literature, for example.
[00:14:07] You can’t apply for History and then decide you’d like to take a module on advanced statistics or microbiology. You’d have to drop out of the course, reapply, and start it all over again.
[00:14:22] Another peculiarity of many British university courses is that there really isn’t that much time spent in lectures, in class.
[00:14:32] I think I had around 10 hours of lectures per week for my class. It might not sound like much at all, especially if you are paying €10,000 a year for the privilege, but the expectation is that you do a lot of self-study and reading around the subject in the remaining time.
[00:14:55] Of course, not every university is the same, but especially at the more selective universities, a lot of your time will be spent reading and studying on your own, and then your contact time with a professor will be spent in discussion, and you are expected to have done extensive preparation beforehand.
[00:15:18] As part of my university studies, I did an ERASMUS exchange and studied at university both in Lyon, in France, and Naples, in Italy, and I had considerably more contact time with professors in both places, but it was a very different style of teaching; much more based on the professor standing in front of a large group of students and imparting their knowledge to them rather than my experience at UCL, which was much more collaborative: small groups, back and forth discussion, and more work out of the classroom than in.
[00:15:59] So, that may or may not be different from what university is typically like in your country.
[00:16:07] Another potential difference is that in the UK, at most universities at least, most modules run all the time. In other words, you will be doing all of your modules at the same time, slowly over the course of the year.
[00:16:25] My wife is a lecturer at a university in Sweden, and with her course, students take one module at a time very intensively, so every day there will be a lecture or some form of tuition, but only for a period of a few weeks, before they move on to another.
[00:16:47] So, let’s move forward with our studies. Depending on the course, students will have a mixture of ongoing coursework and exams at the end of the year.
[00:16:58] In my case, it was almost all exam-based. My course was four years, which included a year spent studying abroad, and each year counted progressively more towards my final mark.
[00:17:13] The first year was 10%, the second 15%, the third another 15%, and the final year 60%. Or something like that, and of course, every university and course will be slightly different.
[00:17:30] And on the subject of marks, the UK has a very specific grading system.
[00:17:38] The top mark is a “first class” degree, which is anything over 70.
[00:17:45] Then you can have an “upper second class” degree, or 2:1, which is a mark in the 60s, a “lower class” degree, a 2:2, which is in the 50s, or a third class degree, which is in the 40s.
[00:18:01] Now, you might be listening to this and thinking, “Hang on, you only need to get a mark of 70 to get the top grade?”
[00:18:09] In many university systems, students get almost full marks, like an Italian getting 30 out of 30 or an American getting a GPA of 4.0. If your university was like this, I can imagine a mark of 70 sounds like nothing to write home about, nothing particularly special.
[00:18:31] Not in the UK. When I graduated, only around 10% of people got 70 and above. Around half got an “upper second class” degree, which is what I got, and the rest got lower second class or third class degrees.
[00:18:49] So getting a mark above 70 is not easy, and it’s incredibly rare for a student to get above 80.
[00:18:58] In my year, nobody got a mark of above 80, and this has included people who have gone on to teach at places like Cambridge and Yale.
[00:19:08] OK, so we have now graduated from a British university, well done us!
[00:19:14] What next?
[00:19:15] Well, the real world of gainful employment is waiting for us, or you might choose to continue studying. In my case, I did a Master’s degree, partly because I had become particularly interested in China and in learning Mandarin, and partly because I didn’t have a concrete idea of what I wanted to do next.
[00:19:37] I went to a different university for my Master’s; I went to one called SOAS, which is a specialist university for Oriental and African studies, still in London.
[00:19:50] And in terms of my experience, it was slightly different to undergraduate, in that the studying aspect was taken more seriously, but the overall format and style were similar.
[00:20:05] So, to wrap things up, I spent five years of my life at university, and enjoyed almost every minute of it.
[00:20:13] I was lucky enough to go to a very good university, one of those four in the UK that rank among the top 10 in the world.
[00:20:22] Of course, university isn’t the right choice for everyone, and many British universities rightly come under criticism for offering expensive degrees that don’t deliver good value for money.
[00:20:34] For me, it was a great choice, and one I would make again in a heartbeat.
[00:20:41] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on British Universities.
[00:20:45] I hope it's been an interesting one, no matter whether you are a budding 17-year-old thinking about applying to a British university or you are 77 years old and you can think of nothing worse than spending Fresher’s Week at a British university.
[00:20:59] If you are interested in learning more about British universities, we have a couple more episodes that might be interesting: episode number 276 is all about Oxbridge [that's Oxford and Cambridge universities], and episode 513 is all about the UK university crisis. I’ll put a link to both of those in the description.
[00:21:21] And as a quick reminder, this was part two of our three-part mini-series on the theme of university.
[00:21:27] In case you missed part one, we talked about the history of university in general, and next up, it’ll be the sordid and scammy history of Trump University.
[00:21:38] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:21:43] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
