# Life Peers in the UK: Respected or Rejected? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [February 12, 2010, 7:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/life-peers-in-the-uk-respected-or-rejected/528763 "2010-02-12T19:46:27Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 22
**Author:** ![Ximenean](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/x/aca169/32.png) [@Ximenean](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ximenean)\ **Post date:** [February 14, 2010, 6:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/life-peers-in-the-uk-respected-or-rejected/528763/22 "2010-02-14T18:38:51Z")
> [@I shall now give SuaSponte an ego boost.](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-shall-now-give-suasponte-an-ego-boost/59050/12): > > I also notice a disturbing tendency for both sides and corporate people in general to respect a “university education” far more than in the US. A university education seems to be limited to Oxford or Cambridge in the UK and Berlin, Munich or another major university in Germany. These seems to perpetuate a dominance of business by a conservative upper-middle-class elite. > > In the Silicon Valley where I work, it’s a geek elite. Woz only got his undergrad after he _left_ Apple; I’m not sure that Jobs ever got a degree. Larry and Sergey were in a Phd Computer Science program when they started Google, which is obviously an excellent background for starting a company. I would disagree with the idea that a degree from certain universities is particularly required, or that Silicon Valley somehow looks past people’s educational record. Steve Wozniak and people like that are rare exceptions. Some university degrees are more prestigious than others, certainly, and there has been the phenomenon in the UK in recent years of polytechnics suddenly declaring themselves to be “universities”, which has perhaps devalued the idea of a university degree, but having the letters BA or BSc still matters in the job market, and not just if it is an “Oxbridge” degree. I don’t see how that is different from the situation in the US. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/life-peers-in-the-uk-respected-or-rejected/528763)._