Bachelor of Arts - Writing and Literature

The Bachelor of Arts with a Major in Writing and Literature is a four-year degree that runs creative practice and literary study together instead of treating them as separate disciplines — and at $19,772 a year it is the lowest-priced program in CapU’s international catalogue.

The writing side is workshop-based: fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry, screenwriting and script development, editing and publishing practice, and professional and technical writing. The literature side covers Canadian and world literature, critical theory, genre and narrative studies, and Indigenous literatures. Students workshop each other’s manuscripts continuously, and CapU’s literary publications give undergraduates real editorial and production experience.

What makes this employable rather than purely artistic is the editing and professional-writing strand. Graduates leave able to structure an argument, edit to a house style and produce clean copy under deadline — a skill set that content, communications and technical writing teams hire constantly.

CapU is a fully public teaching university on Vancouver’s North Shore — a Designated Learning Institution (DLI O19280078102) with university status since 2008. Classes are small, faculty teach rather than delegate to assistants, and tuition sits well below the big Vancouver research universities while the credential carries the same public-institution standing.

Its field maps to CIP 23.0101 (English language and literature, general). As a bachelor’s degree, graduates are exempt from the November 2024 PGWP field-of-study restriction and may qualify for a Post-Graduation Work Permit of up to three years. Full-time on-campus study and graduation remain the conditions, and final decisions rest with IRCC.