Ascent · Social sciences & humanities
Easy to get into. Harder to make it lead somewhere.
Admission is the least of it here. Most social science and humanities programs will take a solid student, which means the real work is choosing a specialization, a school, and a set of courses that add up to something four years later.
Commonly required
- ENG4U
- Six 4U/4M courses for most programs
- MHF4U, and often MCV4U, for economics
Prerequisites and supplementary requirements change year to year and vary by program. Everything here is orientation — we verify each requirement against the program's current admissions page before your student's list is final.
What decides it
Where the weight really falls.
The enriched programs are a different application
McMaster's Arts & Science program and Toronto's small first-year One programs run their own supplementary applications and admit small cohorts. They are the exception to everything else in this stream, and they're on a different calendar.
Pre-law is not a program
Ontario law schools admit from any undergraduate degree. There is no pre-law major, and choosing a law-adjacent program that produces a lower GPA is a net loss. What carries weight is the GPA and the LSAT.
Specialization comes later — which cuts both ways
Most students enter a broad first year and declare after it. That's flexibility for a student who is genuinely exploring, and drift for a student who isn't. The difference is whether anyone asked the question first.
In practice
What Ascent does here.
- Choosing programs by what they let a student do afterward — graduate study, professional school, or work — rather than by admission difficulty
- Flagging the enriched and supplementary-based programs early, since they run on their own timeline
- Straightening out the pre-law and pre-med assumptions before they drive a course selection that doesn't serve them
Where students apply
- Social Science — Western
- Arts & Science (Honours) — McMaster
- Arts & Science — Queen's
- Humanities and Social Sciences — Toronto
- Economics — across Ontario
- Psychology — across Ontario
Representative programs, not a list to apply from — the real list gets built around your student's grades, courses, and what they want out of the degree.
Other streams
Students often sit across two of these.
Next step
Plan the social sciences application properly.
An Ascent session starts with the transcript and the target, and ends with a written plan for what happens between now and the deadline.
Timing — social sciences
Grade 11 · fall
What the degree is meant to lead to — the question this stream most often skips.
Summer before Grade 12
Supplementary drafting for the enriched programs, which have far earlier real deadlines than the rest of the stream.
Grade 12 · fall
OUAC submission, with the list built around specialization and flexibility rather than name recognition.