The University of Leicester and SOAS: A Tale of Poo and Palestine, and the Low Semi-Targets That Almost Were

Some of the older UK posters may remember a time, long before the GFC, when the University of Leicester was actually a perfectly respectable institution.

It sat in that broad Sheffield/Southampton/Cardiff sort of bracket, was part of the old 1994 Group alongside Bath, York, Durham and St Andrews, and even won Times Higher Education University of the Year in 2008.

And then, incredibly, it apparently had the chance to join the Russell Group and declined.

I still cannot believe this.

While other universities spent the 2010s raising entry requirements and strengthening their brands, Leicester seemed to move in the opposite direction, lowering standards to attract more students and gradually weakening its signal.

Today, ask your average prospective student what they know about Leicester and there is a decent chance the answer is less “serious research university” and more TikTok, nights out and the apparently unstoppable genre of students taking a shit in accommodation that is neither their own nor, crucially, a toilet.

Quite the fall from grace.

Had it played things differently, I genuinely think Leicester could today be viewed as a respectable low semi-target where a strong CV might get serious consideration on its own merits.

Then there is SOAS, which declined in a very different way.

SOAS had an excellent niche: London, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, languages, development, politics and emerging markets. For finance, that could have made it a genuinely useful semi-target for EM, sovereigns, commodities, infrastructure and cross-border work.

If I remember correctly, one of those old BCG recruitment slides that circulated a few years back still had SOAS somewhere in the broader semi-target universe.

Instead, the university gradually became almost as famous for activism as academia.

Again, I am not saying serious academic work does not still happen there. Obviously it does. But when the public brand becomes so heavily associated with campus politics, it starts to crowd everything else out.

At that point, a banker seeing SOAS on a CV may be thinking less:

“Interesting, maybe this person speaks Arabic and understands MENA.”

and more:

“What is the probability this person tries to organise a Palestine protest because the client is Israeli?”

A caricature, obviously, but university reputations are built out of caricatures.

So the two stories are almost opposites:

Leicester diluted the academic signal.
SOAS let the political signal overwhelm it.

There is an alternate timeline where Leicester is still a respectable Sheffield/Cardiff-style low semi-target and SOAS is the quirky London semi-target banks like for internationally focused roles.

Instead, we got poo and Palestine.

Pour one out for the semi-targets that almost were.