How many places on a course

[purplegreen99]

Is there a way to find out how many students a university course accepts each year, or how many undergraduates in the department in total?

If you snoop around the website a bit there is likely to be a Student Hub service or something similar. Sometimes called Learning and Teaching Hubs or something along those lines, one for each school/department (so a sciences hub, an arts hub etc). They should have an email address on the website and may be able to tell you. Or email a general admissions email address which again should be widely available on the websites. Failing that ask on The Student Room or similar, there will hopefully be people doing the course this year who will have had compulsory modules in first year and will be able to estimate roughly how many people were in the lectures.

It is often on the course prosectus and on the website.

Lots of course details on the university web sites will state numbers applying and places available.

Thanks. I have only seen this info on a small number of university websites, and it's not on UCAS or Unistats, so I wondered if it was listed elsewhere. I'll get dc to contact the universities. I assume they don't all reveal this info on their websites as it might reveal if they are not filling all their places? Or it might put people off if department is too small or too big? We hadn't though of this before tbh, but now thinking it will make a difference to student experience if there are 30 or 300 students enrolling on a course. Not that large or small is better, just different & different personalities might prefer one or the other.

It certainly will make a difference but you can generally tell just by the course. English, History, etc. will always be big courses if they're at big universities. My course, Culture Literature and Politics has 6, as you'd expect 😂

Worth also looking at which subjects are compulsory, perhaps not for that course but for others. So DS found that the numbers taking first year economics at LSE were huge, as it was a core module for several degrees. Similarly for the compulsory maths module. But in his third year the numbers taking some of the more esoteric options were tiny, though this would not have been the case had he chosen popular options like accountancy or finance.

Which then leads to a look at teaching methods, and whether they suit. The advantage of a big year group is that there will be more options, so more scope to flex the degree towards areas that start to interest you.

I agree with NeedMoreSleep - numbers on a particular course are not any kind of reliable guide to numbers in lectures. You can always email departments for this sort of information.

It's not so much numbers in lectures I was thinking of, more the feel of a department and how easy it would be to get to know other students and be known by staff in the case of a large department, or that a small department could feel a bit claustrophobic, with not enough fellow-students and everyone knowing each other a bit too well.

Fortunately university isn’t just about who you meet on your course. Friends are made in accommodation halls and friends of friends as well. Therefore it’s not all down to who you might meet in 6 hours of contact time!

When my DD graduated, she saw people going up to get their degrees she’d never seen, even in core modules. 120 on the course. They do offer less popular options on many degrees and that cuts numbers down to Oxbridge levels. It really doesn’t matter though. It seems most undergrads find friends and can gel with similar types of people however I do agree a very niche course might be claustrophobic. So Old Norse might be out??!!