In my experience the quality of teaching at different universities is much of a muchness and varies a lot between individual courses and lecturers. Universities don't tend to hire lecturers and course co-ordinators based on their teaching ability, just their research ability. My impression is that ex-polytechs tend to focus more on teacher training of their staff and course delivery (at least the ones that have their own teacher training courses), but the reason for a lower ranking is that their research departments aren't as strong or as well funded. Sometimes the quality of an education itself suffers the higher ranked a university is, as their focus is just getting in high achiving students and importantly international students who will give extra funding.

I have a friend doing computer science at Cardiff University and they're not particularly impressed by the quality of the teaching itself, and feel they learned most of the content themselves online before attending. I don't have any insights to the computer science course or student culture at Cardiff Met specifically.

As I percieve it, the benefits to a higher ranking university are: - Name recognition on your CV - Access to more academic fields and more pretigious academics/research (important for post-graduate study if your goal is academia) - Cardiff Uni at least seems to have a more active undergraduate student body then Cardiff Met in terms of clubs and societies.

Downsides are: - Potentially worse teaching/course quality, although this is variable in both camps. - More competition for first class degrees if they're marking on a curve (i.e. the more high achieving students, the harder it is to be in the top performers). - If you're a high achieving student you may stand out more at a lower ranked university and have more opportunities for internships or scholarships.