In my opinion, I think that it should be mandatory (pls dont kill me!). English goes beyond your ability to improve on grammar, prepositions, verb tenses, spellings, essay structure, etc. It's about learning how to make sense and analyze different subjects to a deeper understanding. In high school, my biggest problem with English was grammar, and to this day, it still is. I think that universities made it a requirement to have Gr. 12 U English mandatory, because the professors want to  know that the student is capable to explain certain situations. At most programs at universities, they will ask you to make essays about certain topics depending on what you are studying. For ex, my sister goes to OCAD U and she was asked to make an essay about Frida Kahlo and how she influenced self-empowerment towards women. I guess that  learning how to summarize an event or a story is a skill that you will take in the future, because you learn how to make the effort to communicate with others the right way.

Essays can enhance your skill to analyze things in a deeper perspective. In different pieces of literature, We try to assess the motives that a certain character has in a story and we think of why they end up doing a particular thing. This assessment of a certain character in a certain piece of literature would help us understand how we could help our friends and peers in the workplace with situations that they are having trouble to resolve in. As well, it could help us assess current issues today and look at how it could affect different factors of things. In conclusion, I think that Gr 12 U English should be a requirement if the program you are getting into requires you to make reports and summaries that allow you to go further within a subject. At the same time, English makes us learn how to discover truths and  tests our ability to gain the knowledge that we need to attain so that we could learn how to process different types of knowledge regardless of the programs that we are taking in University. 

source: tenor.com