Bard College Berlin was founded to return small-group seminar teaching and interdisciplinary undergraduate education in the liberal arts to the highest levels of the European university context where it first originated. With an innovative and challenging core curriculum, a small and highly international student body, and a world-class teaching faculty, Bard College Berlin provides a unique range and depth of education. We believe that specialized study in individual disciplines should proceed based on a broad and thorough knowledge of intellectual traditions and the significant debates, works, and transformations that have animated them.
Bard College Berlin's Class of 2021 was selected from a competitive applicant pool. The 78 students in this group come from 30 different countries and have a wide range of intellectual interests and a strong record of social, cultural, and civic engagement. In 2017, Bard College Berlin received 385 applications for our programs, 59% of these applicants were accepted, and 37% of them enrolled. For current first-year students, the average I.B. score is 34, the average Abitur score is 1.6, and the average U.S. G.P.A. is 3.6.
Bard College Berlin was founded in 1999 as the European College of Liberal Arts (ECLA) by a group of German intellectuals and entrepreneurs to provide a high-quality, small-group seminar and teaching-oriented international program of advanced study for undergraduates of particular promise wishing to study in English. The college's teaching offerings began with an International Summer University (ISU): an intensive, six-week residential study program devoted to studying critical problems and questions in European and world philosophy, literature, and culture. A one-year program (now known as the Academy Year) was developed based on this ethos in 2002, incorporating a core course encompassing Antiquity's significant works, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and elective courses in philosophy, literature, and art history.
The following year, with the Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation's generous support, the college moved to its current campus in Pankow-Niederschönhausen and introduced the second one-year program, the Project Year, offered until today. The foundation was instrumental in ensuring the sustainability and expansion of the college's small-group teaching structure and faculty-student ratio. In the following years, the institution's organizational structure, physical campus, and the first stage of the accreditation process took shape, as recruitment and strategic partnerships also developed.
From 2007, the faculty worked jointly on a new 'value questions' approach to liberal education, leading to the college's first B.A. program's introduction. The B.A. in Value Studies was formally launched in 2009, as the college held the 10th ISU.
A vital purpose of the program's development was to combine the best elements of American liberal arts education, with its emphasis on choice, exploration, critical reflection, and engagement, with the demands of specialist focus in a specific subject area characteristic of European public universities. The institution received state recognition in February 2011 by the Berlin Senate Department of Education, Science, and Research as a private German university. The first German BA degrees were awarded to graduating students in 2012. The B.A. in Humanities, the Arts, and Social Thought became the college's first accredited degree program in September 2013, followed by the B.A. in Economics, Politics, and Social Thought in September 2015. As of January 20, 2017, Bard College Berlin is institutionally accredited at the national level in Germany by the Wissenschaftsrat.
In November 2011, the institution merged with Bard College, New York, an early supporter and the first U.S. college (in 2002) to grant academic credits for work done here. With a long-standing commitment to liberal arts education, Bard College is the center of a global education network that includes Smolny College/Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences at St. Petersburg State University, Russia Al-Quds University on the West Bank, and the American University of Central Asia, in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Bard College Berlin has since become an important center for the Bard network, attracting students and faculty from around the world interested in liberal arts education, the arts, and the meaning of global citizenship.
Founded in 1860, Bard College Annandale is an independent, nonsectarian, residential, coeducational college offering B.A. degrees in nearly 50 academic programs in four divisions and a five-year B.S./B.A. degree in economics and finance. The Bard College-Conservatory of Music offers a five-year program in which students pursue a B.Music and a B.A. in a field other than music. Bard and its affiliated institutions also offer A.A. and B.A. degrees at high schools and early colleges in three U.S. states, and through the Bard Prison Initiative at penal institutions in New York State. Bard offers graduate programs leading to the Master of Arts (M.A.), Master of Science (M.S.), Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.), Master of Teaching (M.A.T.), Master of Business Administration (M.B.A.), and Ph.D.
Bard College Berlin's first-year B.A. students live on campus in co-ed dormitories, usually sharing a room with students from different countries. The dormitories are spacious, light-filled buildings, each no more than five minutes walk from the cafeteria, Student Center, Factory Arts Building, and all other facilities and buildings on campus.
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