University of Toronto - any experiences from US students attending?

[Anonymous]

Just as a heads up - I don't know if it is the same in the US but for Ontario unversities, all applications for all in province schools go through one central application center called OUAC.

You can only be accepted to one in province school at a time. You can accept before the confirmation date at one school but then if you get an admission offer for another school, you have to decline the first admission offer before you can accept the new one.

A lot of students will accept whatever they get offered early (early admission offers go out starting January) but wait until the confirmation deadline in June to finalize their decision. So the schools really don't know who is enrolling until mid June. Then if enrollment is low, they will send out another round of admission offers. Then another round if needed. Kids get in off the wait list right up until the first week of classes!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:They weed out a lot of kids annually. Not a good place.

ok, Mary ...

[Anonymous]

My kid is at McGill but knows kids at Toronto. Harder to get into and rigorous. A great education

[Anonymous]

Great, great university!

[Anonymous]

Amazing U but they do not hold your hand. My friend's son went there and had a broken leg at the end of a fall semester and Toronto was icy/snowy and they wouldn't allow finals online, and really wouldn't help him at all--his friends were bringing him food. I feel like in the US with a doctor's note saying this kid can't walk 2 km through the snow to the final exam, they would have let him do it on zoom or something. That said--amazing university and amazing city. When moving off campus after year 1, she said it helped that they moved with students from the GTA who had Ontario-based parents co-signing on lease--she feels they might have gotten a "foreigner special" in the very tight housing market in Toronto had they rented on their own.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Amazing U but they do not hold your hand.

This is an important difference between many US universities on the one hand -- and most universities in Canada, UK, Ireland, or continental Europe on the other hand.

Students outside the US truly need to self-advocate - and be self-sufficient - and to understand that university faculty/administration exceptions will be less common than at some US universities.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:For Sept 2025, U of T had 60,020 applicants from in province, and 52,888 applicants from outside Ontario or international.

They accepted / confirmed 11039 from in province and 6666 from outside Ontario / international.

Do you know what the yield percentage was / is ?

That is the yield rate. Confirmed acceptances is pretty much the yield rate. A few many not attend if something changes before confirmation and September. The admissions report for Fall 2025 isn't out yet. I can look at the exact numbers of applications, confirmed acceptance, and enrolled in September for 2024 but it will be very similar. Total enrolled in Sept 2024 in first year undergrad was just over 17,700

The yield rate is very high at a university like U of T bc in Canada (as it is in the UK), they don’t play games like we do here where colleges give everyone false hopes that they could get in so a gazillion kids apply (esp since test optional) to provide a 7-figure revenue stream and a super low acceptance rate. U of T tells high school counselors about the minimum score you need to get into each faculty, and your HS doesn’t let you apply unless you have the score. In Canada, counselors tell top 10% of the class which 2-3 colleges they could apply to, then the next 10% get another list of 2-3 colleges, and so forth. Most Canadian seniors apply to 1-2 colleges, that’s why both acceptance rate and yield rate are so high for U of T, UBC, McGill and Waterloo.

Signed,
Dual citizen who went to HS in Canada and college in Canada and U.S.

[Anonymous]

Only bother with the main (St George) campus. Missisauga and Scarborough campuses dont' offer a full residential experience.

Watch out for fraternity hazing rituals involving poutine, if your DS plans to join the Greek system.

[Anonymous]

St George is world class, perennially ranked top 20 globally, higher than colleges like Brown, Dartmouth and Rice in the U.S., lower than HYPMS Penn Hopkins, Oxbridge, Imperial College, LSE and not much else. It’s #1 in Canada but everyone knows unofficially they only count the St George campus, not Scarborough and Mississauga. The latter two serve 2 main purposes: serve local commuter students and lower-stats international students who pay a higher tuition to help fund the massive amount of research at St George.

The undergrad experience at U of T St George is highly rigorous, sink or swim, no hand holding. They treat you very much like an adult who chose learning as your current profession, not like a student the way we think of them here. They weed out a lot of kids in year one (or “Frosh year”; no one says freshmen sophomore junior senior in Canada), up to 25%. And there’s not much partying, so don’t apply if you’re looking for the typical American fun college experience. It’s challenging but not cut-throat hunger games if you know what I mean. Students are all nice and just competing with themselves; teaching staff and research opportunities are incredible. Several high profile tenure professors from Yale, Harvard and MIT left for U of Toronto, a couple explicitly said publicly that the move was partly because of Trump.

In case this is a factor: weed is legal and very no big deal in Toronto, you could smell it everywhere.