University of Waterloo Admission 2027 for International Students

Admission at a glance

The University of Waterloo admits international undergraduates mainly through the Ontario Universities' Application Centre (OUAC), the same shared application service used across Ontario. Admission decisions rest on the applicant's grades in required prerequisite courses, commonly including calculus for Mathematics, Engineering and many Science programs, and for competitive programs such as Software Engineering, Computer Science and other Mathematics programs, on an additional profile of extracurricular and personal information collected after the application is submitted. Waterloo is well known for co-operative education, where students alternate academic terms with paid work terms in industry, and most of its programs, including Arts programs, offer a co-op option alongside a regular non-co-op stream. English proficiency is assessed centrally with the same published minimum across faculties, though Mathematics and Engineering admit competitively at scores above that minimum in practice. Waterloo assesses tuition per term rather than per year, and its international fee resets each September, so the university publishes a combined estimate for the two main terms of a normal academic year rather than a single flat annual figure. Applicants should apply early, since Waterloo reviews and makes offers on an ongoing basis after the application deadline for programs that still have space.

Requirements

Bachelor

Admission is based on grades in required prerequisite courses; Mathematics (including the Cheriton School of Computer Science) and Engineering require additional profile information after applying and admit competitively above the published English and academic minimums. There is no single published minimum average across all programs.

Graduate

Set by the individual department; applicants should confirm requirements, references and, for research programs, a supervisor, on the specific program's page.

Full requirements and documents