The Ontario University Application Centre released its application statistics for February last week. According to the February numbers, few programs are seeing a significant rise in applicants this year.
While most programs saw modest rises in applicants, both general education and physical education programs dropped by 18 and 10 per cent respectively. Agriculture, environmental studies, and math all experienced significant jumps in applications in February.
Nearly more 1000 students applied for environmental studies than last year at this time. This represents an increase of 36.7 per cent. The number of students who cited this as their first choice is 47.6 per cent higher.
Nursing is also popular with over a thousand more applicants, from 8520 applications last year to 9612 this year.
Mathematics has the largest increase in demand with 5310 applications compared to 3595 last year, an increase of over 47 per cent. However, over a quarter of the applications for math are applicants’ fourth or fifth choice.
Overall, the number of applications being processed by Ontario universities is up 4.3 per cent from last year.