How to choose your law university in UK?

This is Part I of the series on ‘Doing LLM in UK’ aimed mostly at students from the various National Law Schools in India who aspire to study LLM in UK. In this part I try to discuss the finer and (mostly) broader nuances of choosing the right university in UK to pursue LLM. We must understand that just like no single sizes fits everyone, so too no single uni would satisfy the demand of every student and thus the choice of a uni would depend on various factors like the size of the pocket (both of the prospective student and his/her parent), career plan, merit, previous work experiences (real work not internships!!!), personal choices of the student etc.

The first step of any student who aims to pursue LLM in UK would be to draw up a list of top 20 tentative law unis, how do we do it? Just like in India there are lot of UK law uni rankings available, but we must remember that most of them talk about LLB and NOT LLM, having said that the rankings of Guardian and Times (requires login) may serve as a good indicator for LLM rank too. Another government sponsored ranking for law unis in UK is the RAE (Research Assessment Exercise) rankings, some tend to discount this ranking as dubious, but my personal opinion is that RAE rankings reflect LLM rankings better than say Guardian or Complete University LLB rankings. But lets be objective and collect all the top 10 unis from the three lists Guardian, Times/Complete University Guide and RAE – obviously there are going to be repetitions, and there would be some unique ones (unis which are mentioned in one list but nowhere near top 10 in other list). So finally you would get somewhere between 20 unis in your list. This is the master list. My list looked something like this Cambridge, Oxford, LSE, UCL, KCL, QMUL, SOAS, Nottingham, Warwick, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow, Bristol, Kent, Reading, Strathclyde, Exeter, Dundee (this list is not of any ranking but merely collection of unis that I culled out from longer lists for more in-depth examination).

Let us look at the usual marks which a student needs to gain an offer of admission into these unis (please do remember that these are just ball park representative figure and may be different from the official minimum), to get into Oxbridge and LSE one needs at least 65% marks, for UCL, KCL and Edinburg its 60%, for QMUL, Nottingham and other red brick and plate glass unis its 55% and some other unis like Cardiff and SOAS even take student having a bare pass. Having said this I must remind readers that to get into the top 5 unis one needs to have some extra curricular achievements  (not just marks) and must be duly embellished in the statement of purpose.

So now depending on the marks you have scored you can shorten the list to say 15 (towards either the higher end or the lower depending on which end of the spectrum you fit in – this means that if you are a 70% holder only apply to the top 15, if you are 50% holder don’t waste your money by applying to Oxbridge)

However there is a small twist, an average LLM in UK including tuition and living cost would cost around 15-18 lakhs INR, thats a lot of money and many students want a scholarship, most of the unis have scholarships for masters students but the competition is fierce (I would in a later post write on how best to apply for a scholarship). So if you are a scholarship aspirant the list makes no sense as it is going to pit you against the best students in the top 20 unis, so spread the net wide and check on every uni website if they have scholarship and apply to all of them (they say beggars cant be choosers, but there’s no limit for number of attempts).

So the post in nutshell if you have unlimited budget, outstanding marks and influential reco then only apply to the first three on my list - Cambridge, Oxford, LSE and maybe UCL as an insurance. If you have unlimited budget, average marks then apply for KCL and QMUL (basically stay in London). If you require scholarship (which means you must have outstanding marks and influential reco) then apply to any uni which has a scholarship for masters and then select the topmost uni in your list which offers you a scholarship.