This year, we continued to advance the implementation of the LA&PS Colleges re-envisioning mandate to deliver intentional programming to align to the student's life-cycle. This includes the new First-Year Experience eClass, Peer Mentorship Program and engagement events, the Upper Year Student Experience, which provides leadership and development opportunities for 3rd and 4th year students, as well as supports and expanded programming for Grad Students such as Grad Choir. Founders College also continued to offer events and programming specific for BIPOC students.

We continued to support student success through LA&PS academic support initiatives. The Student Numeracy Assistance Centre at Keele (SNACK) provides numeracy support with math, statistics, coding and Excel to all York students enrolled in LA&PS courses. Peer Assisted Study Sessions (PASS) offer free weekly study sessions to students enrolled in select Administrative Studies, Economics, Information Technology, English and French courses. Our Student Success team had a total of 10,764 student visits supporting 2,782 unique students in our sessions this year.

We successfully delivered two sections of Math for LA&PS this past year, which was in its second year of operation. The online 12-week 12U math waiver non-degree course successfully provides new pathways for students with gaps in their skill set and addresses the numeracy shortfall experienced by many incoming students. The sixty-one participating students completed the course with an average grade of 80%.

In September 2024, the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies successfully launched a new paid co-op program, available to all students starting in their second year of study. Co-op provides students with meaningful work experience, an opportunity to explore career paths, develop professional and transferable skills while offsetting the cost of their education.

LA&PS raised $180,000 to offer co-op in not-for-profit community agencies, which created 15 new summer co-op positions exclusively for LA&PS students.

168 community partners hosted 229 students enrolled in 19 undergraduate and graduate Placement Courses. Through these supervised placements, students had the opportunity to apply classroom theory in the field while earning academic credit.

This year, LA&PS also increased its career readiness supports for students including new customized workshops, new resources, one-on-one peer support sessions, resume, cover letter and LinkedIn profile critiques and more.

To better support Undeclared Major (UNMA) students, we enhanced our YU Explore program this year to help new UNMA students select a major as they move into their second year of study. Programming included events such as Majors' Week, which promoted popular degree options like Commerce, Economics and Social Science to students. Additionally, this year we piloted Connect with a Professional, which connected UNMA students to York University professionals for career insights and job shadowing. We have also developed a detailed communications plan based on UNMA data to better support the next cohort of UNMA students.

We continued to refine our Dean's Circle of Student Scholars (DCSS) program curriculum for high-achieving LA&PS students. This year, we hosted a variety of events throughout the academic term to enhance community and leadership skills for over 300 scholars.

This year, the Operations Management team worked closely with LA&PS staff to support the delivery of the Becoming YU program, which provides LA&PS Work Study Students a rewarding and enriching earn-and-learn experience within the Faculty. This partnership reflects our shared commitment to student success and experiential learning, while fostering a supportive environment for professional growth.

To bolster the recruitment, enrolment and success of international students, we continued to enhance the international student curriculum to focus on Conversion, Orientation, Transition and Retention. This included refinement of our York First Friend international peer mentorship program, which supported over 130 first-year international students, a series of First Year Pre-Arrival webinars to help support incoming students transition to university life and targeted communications campaigns focused on supporting incoming students through the enrolment and onboarding process. We also delivered seven Career Readiness workshops focusing on a range of professional development areas for international students. 

This year, we launched a new Academic & Communication Excellence (ACE) Certificate program consisting of practical workshops and hands-on experiences to better support international students at LA&PS. 

We established a new Retention Committee this year to better understand the current state of LA&PS students and to identify opportunities to improve student retention.

The Curriculum team has created an updated list of General Education courses, which has now been uploaded to the Academic Calendar. This update aims to improve clarity for students regarding General Education course options and to establish a more reliable and authoritative source for this information.

The Curriculum team has started working on addressing the course variances and long-term non-offerings in LA&PS in order to improve student experiences and success.

The Curriculum team has supported the publication of the 2025–2026 academic calendar through the CMS and is continuously working to improve the process and refine the calendar to enhance the student experience.

This year we launched a new Academic Honesty website designed to support student's understanding of York's updated Senate Academic Conduct Policy and Procedures, connecting students with resources that enhance coursework and help avoid academic misconduct.

We implemented a new Academic Advising Cluster model to deliver more targeted support to students based on their degree program. Advising also used nudges and early-alert notifications to provide more timely support to at-risk students in the School of Administrative Studies and the Department of Economics to increase their academic success.

The Academic Advising team collaborated with LA&PS Communications to develop a communications calendar to support students throughout the year by highlighting important dates, deadlines and timelines to help them make more informed and timely decisions pertaining to their academic career and degree plan.

The Academic Advising team sent a Faculty-wide advising survey to over 3000 LA&PS students, all academic advisors, program coordinators and undergraduate program directors to get feedback on the cluster advising model to evaluate the effectiveness of the new model and improve service delivery for the 2025-2026 academic year.

Magy Baket, a LA&PS advisor in the Department of Economics, won the the 2025 Ronald Kent Medal Award, given yearly to staff who promote collegiality, consistently go above and beyond the requirements of their role, and support the values of excellence, progressiveness, sustainability, inclusivity, diversity, social justice and equity.