How much weight do firms give to the university you go to? Is it relatively small or a massive advantage/disadvantage? From my understanding, with law students it matters to a certain extent but I'm a non-law student so I'm not sure if that changes things.
@angdps this is a very good question! Personally, I've played around with this topic many times over the last few years (especially when I felt like my applications were not getting anywhere) but my honest opinion is that it doesn't matter a great deal so as to affect the likelihood of your application progressing.
The reason being, it's not factored into the screening process. Traditionally ATS's such as CvMail and Vantage (which allow the primary user e.g. Grad Rec to filter out applicants based off any question in the application) were only used to filter out academic criteria and where there were EC's these were decided holistically. I'd be surprised if anyone would then filter out based off universities without disclosing this as part of their initial criteria. For example, I think
Slaughter and May used to filter on universities and in line with industry-wide transparency they disclosed it. If this was actively happening, other firms would disclose it too (it's not illegal and unnecessary applications cost £1000's). The only time it could realistically affect you is through some bias of the end-reader, however unconscious bias training is now actively given to graduate recruitment/assessors on the VS/TC so as to prevent the likelihood of this happening. So, for anyone worried about whether or not their university will hold them back, please don't be.
I think the issue is more to do with the applicant pool itself, which can be attributed to recruitment strategy and applicant confidence/perceived prospects (I won't bore you with my theory but please apply).
P.S. If it helps anyone, just know I went to a clearance university that's 79 on the league tables.
