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Guardian University guide 2016 highlights Birkbeck

Birkbeck is profiled in the latest edition of the Guardian University Guide

Birkbeck is profiled in the latest edition of the Guardian University Guide, published this week.

The College profile highlights Birkbeck’s unique full time evening undergraduate degrees, taught over three years and now offered in some 70 subjects ranging across the arts, sciences, social sciences, law and business. It notes their continuing popularity – Birkbeck had an increase of 308% in students signing up for these during 2011-2013, the biggest percentage rise in undergraduate students in the sector over the period.

It says, “Birkbeck, University of London was founded…to make university study accessible to working Londoners for whom traditional full-time study was not an option. Almost 200 years on, it's still committed to making higher education accessible to all,” and adds that the college is “research intensive, with many renowned academics.”

Birkbeck does not appear in the Guardian’s ranking of universities because - as a relative newcomer to UCAS - the number of full-time undergraduate students studying these courses at the College is not yet high enough to provide a useful guide to the course. We anticipate that this situation will change within the next two years.

The Guardian university guide follows the recent publication of the QS worldwide ranking of universities by subject areas, which ranked the College among the top 100 universities worldwide in four subject categories – English Literature, History, Philosophy and Psychology. It also ranked Birkbeck in the top 150 universities worldwide for Law, and in the top 200 worldwide for Linguistics, Geography and Sociology.

The results of the 2014 Research Excellence Framework, published in December last year, placed Birkbeck 30th in the UK for research, with 73% of its research rated ‘world leading’ or ‘internationally excellent’. Half of Birkbeck’s submissions were placed in the top 20 nationally, with Psychological Sciences 5th in the UK, Earth Systems and Environmental Sciences 6th and Biological Sciences 11th.

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