Employers who focus on the signals your education emits seem to focus on where you studied rather than on what you studied. In other words, they seem to think that having a degree from Oxbridge correlates with being a good worker more strongly than memorizing the Divine Comedy does, or acquiring any other specific set of knowledge does. This belief (in the superior signalling value of an Oxbridge degree) seems to be quite weakly correlated with what Oxbridge and competing universities actually teach their students. It seems to me that universities' reputations are quite sticky, so that even if a red-brick university tried to raise standards in order to raise the signalling value of their degree, they wouldn't be able to beat the signalling value of an Oxbridge degree. If this is true, then employers' focus on signalling implies a very weak pressure on educational standards. If employers are going to give your degree pretty much the same signalling value regardless of the content of your course, then universities' will not be incentivized to improve or even maintain educational standards.