Fighting for a seat at the library is a rite of passage for every university student. Especially during exam season, it takes a lot of strategic planning and collaborative tactics with your flatmates to ensure that you get a decent desk for the day.
Some unis get a lot more crowded than others though, thanks to high numbers of staff and students on compact campuses. Now, online tutoring platform Edumentors has looked into which universities are the busiest of them all.
The study is based on the number of students, faculty and staff relative to the university’s campus size. It says that ‘unlike traditional rankings that focus on academics or funding, this study raises important questions about how limited space affects access to resources, study areas, and student well-being’.
After crunching a whole lotta numbers, the research concluded that the University of Manchester is the second most densely populated university in the whole world. That’s based on there being a total of 57,785 people on a 0.35 square kilometre campus, which equates to 165,100 people per square kilometre.
Edinburgh University was named the world’s third most packed uni with a population density of 149,763. That’s based on Edumentors’ findings that there are around 52,417 people on the 0.35 sqkm campus.
Also making it into the top 10 most overcrowded unis on the planet were University College London, which placed sixth with 67,995 staff and students per sqkm, and Imperial College London, which landed in tenth place with 30,381 people per sqkm.
But before you scratch those off your UCAS options in favour of quieter campuses, it’s worth taking the data with a sizeable pinch of salt. Let’s remember that uni campuses are also built upwards. The University of Manchester says that it has a gross internal floor area of 0.89 square kilometres across 229 buildings. That would more than halve the population density estimated by Edumentor.
Explaining its working out, Edumentor says that each campus area ‘was determined either through official reports, satellite measurements or machine learning approximations for universities with missing area data. This allowed for a fair comparison of institutions, particularly those with urban or rural settings, which tend to have vastly different campus sizes.’
See the full list of the world’s top 10 ‘most overcrowded’ unis here.
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