Bachelor of Arts in Business and Society

at York University - School of Continuing Studies Canada

The Financial & Business Economics program in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies is specifically designed for students who are interested in understanding the workings of financial markets, such as the stock market and the financing of companies. You'll gain a broad understanding of the economic framework upon which financial theory is based and gather the tools needed for navigating financial markets and business decisions.

The program combines a rigorous quantitative and analytical approach with practical application. Through a blend of economic theory and applied tools of modern finance, you will develop a solid knowledge of the microeconomic principles underlying financial markets and instruments, the macroeconomic role of finance, and the quantitative tools commonly used for analyzing financial markets.

You'll take courses such as: Corporate Finance, International Monetary Economics and Financial Econometrics to gain insight into important subject areas including:

• Budgeting
• Saving
• Investing
• Borrowing
• Lending
• Insuring
• Hedging
• Diversifying
• Asset management.

Your degree will prepare you for careers in the financial sector or graduate studies in finance or financial economics.

• You'll study with professors who are actively engaged in the theoretical and empirical analysis of financial markets.
• This highly structured and focused program equips you with highly marketable skills, readying you for a career in the financial sector.

Join the first and only technical blockchain certificate delivered by a Canadian university. Create real-world blockchain solutions as you build upon your existing knowledge and prepare to confidently launch your career.

What is Blockchain Development?
Blockchain is decentralized, transparent, and mostly unalterable. It improves data integrity through using an entire network of computers to record and validate transactions. This technology became popular within commerce, but its potential is being realized across numerous industries, including supply chain management, healthcare, finance, and public administration, specifically with electronic voting systems.

What you will learn
You’ll learn to go beyond understanding cryptography and data structures, by gaining the confidence to advise organizations on how blockchain can offer significant business value and knowing when and when not to implement the technology. You’ll develop the knowledge and competencies to be strategic about implementing blockchain technologies from concept to deployment at your organization. Aside from critical technical skills, you will build and practice foundational cross-functional skills like complex problem solving, business acumen, and social perceptiveness.

Program Benefits
Created in collaboration with industry executives, this full-time 9-course program allows you to create real-world blockchain solutions as you collaborate with like-minded peers. The program concludes with a unique capstone course, allowing you to further demonstrate your knowledge and graduate with a diverse portfolio of work. After completing the program, you’ll be prepared for real blockchain job functions, helping you secure your next career opportunity and greater success.

York offers one of the largest, most productive and innovative communities of scholars engaged in interdisciplinary research and undergraduate and graduate teaching in sociology.

Sociology looks at social relations, interactions and power dynamics to gain insight into how society works. Sociology is the study of societies and the way that they shape people's behaviour; beliefs, and identity. Probably the most important thing about sociology is that it enables us to make sense of the rapidly changing world that we live in. Perhaps most fundamentally of all, sociology enables us to understand ourselves. The way that we think, behave, and feel, indeed our very sense of identity, is socially produced.

In York's Sociology program, you'll gain a comprehensive understanding of how human action and consciousness both shape and are shaped by surrounding cultural and social structures. Develop excellent reading, writing and key critical and analytical reasoning skills. Learn research techniques that can be applied to virtually any aspect of social life:

• Criminal justice system and social regulation
• Social class and inequality
• Organization, welfare or education reform
• Health care
• Race and racism
• Discrimination and law
• Gender relations
• Migration and how families differ and flourish

At either campus, you will study with great professors such as Stuart Schoenfeld, a specialist in the sociology of the environment; Françoise Boudreau, the recipient of several awards for outstanding teaching; Donald Carveth, a renowned psychoanalyst frequently featured on CBC and other media; and Brian Singer, a specialist in social and political thought.

Study in one of the largest Geography programs in any university in Canada. Whether you're pursuing your Bachelor of Science and focusing on physical geography or gaining expertise about human geography through a Bachelor of Arts, York's program offers you the world at your doorstep.

Geography is the science of place and space. Geographers ask where things are located on the surface of the earth, why they are located where they are, how places differ from one another, and how people interact with the environment. There are two main branches of geography: human geography and physical geography.

Geographers also study the linkages between human activity and natural systems. Geographers were, in fact, among the first scientists to sound the alarm that human-induced changes to the environment were beginning to threaten the balance of life itself. They are active in the study of global warming, desertification, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, groundwater pollution, and flooding.

In the Faculty of Science, the Bachelor of Science (BSc) degree emphasizes physical geography, which examines the physical, chemical and biological processes that occur in the immediate vicinity of the Earth's surface. Physical geographers study patterns of climates, land forms, vegetation, soils, and water. They forecast the weather, manage land and water resources, and analyze and plan for forests, rangelands, and wetlands. Many human and physical geographers have skills in cartography and geographic information systems. Field work is also emphasized, including outdoor laboratory sessions, field trips and periodic field courses in Southern Ontario as well as to remote and exotic regions.

Computer Security is a multi-faceted and challenging field. Ensuring the privacy of personal data, preventing unauthorized access to computer systems, ensuring back-up contingency plans in the event of data loss and protecting systems from malicious activity such as viruses and worms are just a few areas you can get involved in.

What You'll Learn 
In our Computer Security program you will build a solid background in computer science and math. You will study a variety of courses, including cryptography and operating systems. Computer security is the specialized part of computer science that studies threats to computer systems and networks. It is the science and practise of how to mitigate them. You will become an expert on all those topics. 

We offer both BA and BSc degrees, which share the same computer science and math requirements. In the BA program, you will complement your studies with courses from the Liberal Arts (e.g., humanities, social sciences). In BSc, the complimentary courses will be in the sciences (e.g., biology, chemistry, physics).

After third year, you can put your knowledge to the test by taking part in our paid internship program. We have teamed up with a variety of major companies to ensure you gain valuable professional experience. 

Some Courses You'll Take  

• Object Oriented Programming 
• Mobile App Development 
• Design and Analysis of Algorithms 
• Computer Security Management 
• Applied Cryptography 
• Computer Security Management and Forensics

Gain insight into critical business topics such as strategic competition, the internal organization of firms and international issues facing businesses in the changing global marketplace.

Business Economics combines economic theories with the field of business administration. This field of study is concerned with the study and consequences of scarcity and strategic competition. Individuals, households, businesses and nations all experience some level of scarcity in that they do not possess all the resources to satisfy all their wants and needs. Decisions have to be made to balance those scarce resources in order to improve what can be achieved with them.

The Business Economics program is concerned with how:

• These decisions are made;
• The resources of a nation or business are allocated and utilized in the production of goods and services; and
• The rewards of these activities are distributed.

You will become acquainted with all the activities which illustrate the practical nature of the subject, such as commercial reports, articles in newspapers and periodicals and examples from daily life. This program integrates aspects of economics and business studies, focusing on the use of economic analysis and statistical methods to deal effectively with management problems in practical business fields. By applying economic theory to business management, you will become familiar with the analytical and decision-making techniques used in the business world and with the public and private institutional environments within which businesses operate.

Students who take our Marketing & Consumer Economics course work on a real-world market consulting project which gives them the opportunity to develop a full marketing plan for an outside organization.

Our program encompasses subject areas that are exceptionally diverse while allowing you to design a custom made program suited to your interests.

This cross-disciplinary Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies program encompasses subject areas that are exceptionally diverse. In addition to Judaism as a religion, Jewish Studies explores the texts, histories, cultures, sociologies, languages and fine arts of the Jewish people from biblical times to the present.

• Study the aspects within the context of the many western and non-western civilizations in which Jewish people have lived.
• Examine Jewish interactions with non-Jewish people over the ages, evolving attitudes toward and images of Jewish people within a variety of non-Jewish cultures and the history of anti-Semitism, including the Holocaust.
• Explores the Jewish experience with a view to understanding the human situation in its diversity and complexity.

Urban Studies at York stresses the importance of fieldwork when studying the social and spatial fabric of cities.

The city is among the most fundamental human institutions. Across history, cities have been sites of basic innovation in economic, political and cultural life — centres of trade, seats of empire and the locale of scientific, social and artistic creativity. Cities retain these roles today and are the home of a growing majority of the world’s population who increasingly live in large metropolitan regions of several million people. Often, as in many Canadian cities, these urban regions are marked by complex social diversity, striking contrasts of wealth and poverty and a challenging array of planning and environmental dilemmas.

Urban Studies is the attempt to understand cities and city life — how they function, the current and future concerns of their residents. This encompasses the political institutions, economic and social relations, physical landscapes and cultural frameworks that constitute the city.

As a student in Urban Studies, you will focus on cities as distinctive entities and explore the meaning and function of cities in the larger society. You'll be taking courses from a broad range of fields including:

• History
• Environmental studies
• Geography
• Anthropology
• Political science
• Sociology
• Psychology.

You will also examine the processes that produce certain patterns of human settlement and chart the changing relationships among areas shaped by urbanization, such as metropolis and countryside, city and suburb, municipality and region.

This Specialized Honours BA program blends English and Professional Writing into a single degree program that highlights and enhances the relationship between the two fields of study as opposed to a traditional double major or major/minor degree in which the two fields are treated as separate rather than complementary disciplines.

English and Professional Writing is a “keeping doors open” program for students as devoted to reading and thinking critically about literature as they are to writing. The English side of the degree keeps open the possibility of graduate work in literary studies or a post-degree program in Education, while the Professional Writing side attends to practice and more immediate employability.

English and Professional Writing is, so far as we know, unique in Canada in offering this dual qualification, which produces graduates with a greater range of practical skills than graduates of English programs and greater theoretical sophistication and rhetorical flair than graduates of writing programs. It is not for every student but, for some medleys of aptitudes and aspirations, it is a glove.
For more information on the Professional Writing side of the ENPR program, please visit  http://prwr.writ.laps.yorku.ca/about/

Start down the path to earning a valuable CPA designation in this supportive program taught by industry professionals. Establish the professional skills required to pursue your full career potential.

Accounting professionals are an essential member for any organization, as they record, organize, and interpret a business’ vital financial information. The Post-Graduate Certificate in Accounting will qualify you for roles in accounting and finance, and help you get the necessary industry experience to excel in this rewarding career field.

If your goal is to become a Chartered Professional Accountant (CPA), we can help you. Our program will deepen your understanding of accounting while simultaneously sharpening your critical thinking, communication, and management skills.

What you will learn
Designed in consultation with senior industry executives, thought leaders, and prominent York University academics, the Certificate will equip you with relevant and in-demand knowledge. Your course content will be immediately applicable in the workplace. The program culminates with a unique final capstone course where you will apply your knowledge to real-world business challenges, so you can leverage this robust experience and knowledge to pursue your career ambitions with confidence.

Program Benefits
Our flexible accounting education is designed to meet the needs of a wide range of students. The entire program can be completed in just one academic year of full-time study, which is considerably quicker than comparable programs. You will also benefit from studying alongside a community of accounting students who are completing the program on the same schedule. The network of peers and instructors gained in this program will serve as a solid community of like-minded professionals to help you establish and advance your career.