Liberal Arts with Foundation Year

Liberal arts with a foundation year offers the flexibility of a cross-disciplinary humanities education to students who benefit from an additional year of academic preparation before engaging with the full degree programme. Liberal arts as an approach to higher education reflects a conviction that intellectual breadth, the ability to move fluently between different disciplines and to make connections that specialist study cannot, is a form of genuine cultivation rather than a dilution of expertise. The foundation year provides a supported introduction to academic study, developing the skills and confidence needed to engage with university-level work across the arts and humanities.

At Birkbeck College, which has a long tradition of making higher education accessible to adult learners through part-time and flexible study, this programme allows you to plot your own path through subject areas including literature, art, history, law, politics and psychology without having to choose between them. The uniquely flexible degree structure means you can develop a genuinely personalised programme of study that reflects your own intellectual interests and goals, supported by the distinctive tutorial and research culture that Birkbeck offers.

Liberal arts graduates bring intellectual versatility, critical thinking, cultural awareness and the ability to work across disciplinary boundaries to their careers. Law, the civil service, management, publishing, journalism, education, arts administration, the charitable sector and international organisations are all natural destinations for graduates whose undergraduate training has been explicitly designed to develop range and transferability rather than narrow specialism. Many go on to postgraduate study in a specific discipline that they discovered or deepened during their liberal arts degree, taking the breadth of their undergraduate preparation into more focused academic or professional development.