Wilfrid Laurier University is a public university with campuses in Waterloo, Brantford and Milton, Ontario, Canada. The newer Brantford and Milton campuses are not considered satellite campuses of the original Waterloo campus, instead the university describes itself as a “multi-campus multi-community university”. The university also operates offices in Kitchener, Toronto, Yellowknife, and Chongqing, China. It is named in honour of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the seventh Prime Minister of Canada. The university offers undergraduate and graduate programs in a variety of fields, with over 15,000 full-time undergraduate students, over 1000 full‑time graduate students, and nearly 4,000 part-time students as of fall 2019. Laurier’s varsity teams, known as the Wilfrid Laurier Golden Hawks, compete in the West Conference of the Ontario University Athletics, affiliated to the U Sports.
The university has an enrolment of about 17,000 full-time and part-time undergraduate students, and over 1,500 full-time and part-time graduate students. It has over 500 faculty and staff members. Laurier has been transitioning from a primarily undergraduate university to a mid-size research university. In the 2022 Maclean’s magazine survey of Canadian universities, Laurier was ranked seventh out of 15 Canadian universities in the magazine’s comprehensive university category.
The Registrar’s Report for Winter 2016 indicates that the six most popular majors at Laurier, across the entire university, were (in order): Business, Communications Studies, Psychology, Criminology, Economics, and Biology.