___________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Access, and Support Indigenous Trauma and Resiliency field, which is delivered in a hybrid format to support participation from students in more remote communities. Many programs have also introduced new courses in Indigeneity, including the Faculty of Law’s JD program, which has introduced a popular required first-year course on Indigenous Peoples and the Law taught by one of Canada’s most prominent Indigenous legal scholars.
UTSC and UTM also continue to provide their campus-wide curriculum renewal funding that includes supports for anti-racist and Indigenous pedagogies and universal design for learning. The University of Toronto has a fundamental commitment to inclusive excellence and continues to strengthen equity, diversity, inclusion, indigeneity, and accessibility across all University activities, believing that excellence flourishes in an environment that embraces the broadest range of people and helps them achieve their full potential.
5 The well-established Transitional Year Programme at U of T, for example, is a full-time, eight-month access-to-University program intended for mature students who do not have the formal qualifications for university admission. It actively encourages applications from members of the Indigenous, African-Canadian, and LGBTQ communities, as well as from sole-support parents, persons with disabilities, and individuals from working-class backgrounds of all ethnicities, taking in about 50 students a year.
The Temerty Faculty of Medicine runs several outreach programs, including the MedLinx, Summer Mentorship Program, and STEAM Design programs that are aimed at supporting high school students from under- represented backgrounds and communities explore careers in health sciences. Additionally, each U of T campus has a version of the Support, Engage, Experience (SEE) UofT program, which is a collaborative initiative between divisions and local school boards to make post-secondary education more accessible to high-school students from historically underrepresented communities.
As part of its efforts to make university more accessible and inclusive for Indigenous students, in Fall 2023 U of T introduced its Indigenous Tuition Initiative. This program covers the cost of tuition for students from nine First Nations with territories near the University’s campuses. U of T also honours the Jay Treaty of 1794 by offering domestic Ontario tuition rates to Indigenous or Native American students from the United States.
These tuition changes complement other University efforts to make our campuses more accessible to Indigenous students, including incorporating Indigenous content into academic curricula and research programs, creating physical spaces to honour Indigenous traditions and histories, and expand the presence of Indigenous students, staff, faculty. The University continues to invest in programs that will improve the academic and personal success of students. In response to Bill 166, the University recently published its first annual Student Mental Health Annual Report.
The Report highlights the University’s innovative and highly successful Stepped Care Model of student mental health built on a continuum of services that optimize access to early intervention, health promotion, and counselling services, as well as hospital partnerships that support the acute mental health needs of students. The model includes a 9-stem model from information and education to crisis support, and includes the 24/7 Telus Health Student Support App funded by the University to provide self-directed support in 140 different languages, which was access by over 10,000 users in 2024-25.
Further down the continuum is one- on-one counselling services, which last year included 106,000 appointments by over 10,000 unique students – 95% of whom saw a counsellor on the same day. To support students with the most acute needs, U of T has partnered with the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) since 2022 to launch the University of Toronto Navigation Service (UTN), which supports annually approximately 500 emergency department presentations of U of T students. Students at UTM and UTSC campuses will have comparable acute care services in the coming years through partnerships with Trillium Health Partners and the Scarborough Health Network.
With the support of the University’s Access Strategy and Partnerships Office and more than $5.1 million in seed funding from the Provost’s Access Programs University Fund (APUF), academic units have developed more than 100 programs that address the gaps in supports for students from communities currently underrepresented in universities.
Funded projects have included the Building Indigenous Representation at Daniels (BIRD), the Caribbean and Black Writing Collective at UTM, and The Next Surgeon – High School Mentorship Program through the Temerty Faculty of Medicine, which is delivered in partnerships with Unity Health Toronto to workshops and mentoring opportunities for grade 10-12 students in Toronto Community Housing to get a glimpse of what it’s like to work in medical professions.
Many divisions have begun to see positive changes, including increased enrolments of Black students in the MD program, more Indigenous students in the undergraduate law (JD) program, and higher proportions of women in undergraduate engineering programs. Divisions also continue to innovate their outreach and application processes to support their commitments to improving diversification. The Factor-Inwentash School of Social Work, for example, has created optional admission streams for Black and Indigenous applicants.
In recent years, new majors, minors, and areas of specialization have been added to programs, including in professional graduate programs like the Master of Public Health (Indigenous Health field) and Master of Social Work 5 See the UofT policy on Equity, Diversity and Excellence: https://governingcouncil.utoronto.ca/secretariat/policies/equity-diversity- and-excellence- statement-december-14-2006. For more on the University’s equity, diversity and inclusion programs for students as well as staff and faculty, see the EDI Annual Report from the Vice-President, People, Strategy, Equity and Culture:
https://people.utoronto.ca/wp- content/uploads/2022/06/Equity-Diversity-Inclusion-Annual-Report-2021.pdf Enrolment Report 2025-26 23 University of Toronto