Many students look for a difference in their prospects.
And graduates do get more jobs, better jobs and higher lifetime earnings. A degree is a meal ticket, a passport. We were not looking for a re-run of the radicalising campuses of the 1960s or a transplanted Oxbridge or for imitations of the ivied halls of elite US universities. Universities were judged against four criteria. Third, we looked at the formal curriculum, the options it offered, whether it allowed students to change directions as they learned, whether it pushed them outside their specialisations, whether it expected and supported high levels of achievement.