Cornell's Backdoor Way In

Colleges and Universities A-Z Cornell University
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<p>I came across this article...
ILR</a> Class of 2012 members among top students nationally</p>

<p>The part that caught my eye was</p>

<p>"The 150 entering freshmen will be joined by 123 incoming transfer students this fall. ILR received 237 applications for transfer admissions, up 2 percent from 2007." </p>

<p>THAT IS AN OVER 50% TRANSFER ACCEPTANCE RATE!</p>

<p>Honestly, I was shocked. I mean, COME ON! How is it possible that the acceptance rate for transfers is exponentially higher than the freshman acceptance rate. I mean, the transfer rates for engineering and A&S are ~8% and ~13% respectively, which is a LOT more reasonable. The other ivy league schools (that have transfers) probably have ~5% transfer rate (don't quote me on that). Is this an ivy league or a state school (no offense, just need to make a comparison)...</p>

<p>I walk around campus and am honestly surprised at the number of students wearing shirts/sweaters that have other colleges on them. Seriously, half the people I meet are transfers, and sometimes, that isn't an overstatement.</p>

<p>Now, don't get me wrong. I'm sure there are some really smart transfers out there who benefit the school greatly and who go on to do great things. But a LOT of them come in just because they got 3.8+s in community colleges (which I honestly believe isn't that hard) and start failing at Cornell. </p>

<p>I'm not an elitist. I just think that a school of Cornell's prestige should crack down and become a bit more selective on who gets in. Cause a 50% acceptance rate is just plain RIDICULOUS.</p>

<p>That's just my take on things. I have some really good friends that are transfers, so it's not like I'm against them. I just think Cornell should be a bit more picky considering that there's no real point in getting in as a freshman cause if you fail, you can just sneak in the "backdoor" which accepts 1 out of every 2 students. To the transfers here who are doing well, don't get too offended, cause if you're doing well, you probably would've gotten in even if the acceptance rate was much lower.</p>

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<p>many of the school’s best students have been transfers…</p>

<p>i think they’re more ambitious. </p>

<p>the way the ILR curriculum works, most of your CC classes will transfer in as electives. </p>

<p>you still have to take most of your CORE ILR curriculum at the ILR school…except for if you transfer in STATISTICS…</p>

<p>doubt there are many (if any) comm colleges that offer labor history, labor econ, labor law, etc</p>

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<p>Wow. First of all you’re a snob. Second of all you’ve clearly never thought to consider the possibility that ILR offers guaranteed transfer, which is what most of the people getting accepted as transfers were offered when they didn’t get in as freshmen. It is offered at all of the contract colleges, but not the private ones. Is that a good enough answer for you?</p>

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<p>gosnia, I knew someone would bring that up.</p>

<p>From what I’ve heard, guaranteed transfers are limited to around 50 people total (that’s all 3 contract colleges). I vaguely remember reading that from a statistic posted by someone on CC before (that had a link to confirm it).</p>

<p>I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt, and let’s say all 50 are GTs to the ILR school.
Hmm…so that means around 70/230 were accepted through the regular transfer process. That’s still around a 30% acceptance rate, which is still MUCH higher than freshman rate and exponentially higher than the transfer rate of other ivies + peer schools.</p>

<p>And I highly doubt that there’s 50 GTs to ILR every year.</p>

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<p>ILR is probably the college that struggles with recruitment the most (based on a gut feeling)</p>

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<p>@wavedasher</p>

<p>Well, you’re the most articulate ■■■■■ I’ve ever seen on here. Props, I guess? Or, maybe, you actually believe what you said. In that case I’ll simply have to agree to disagree with you.</p>

<p>Anyway, you’re going on hearsay: ILR won’t publish its numbers for GT vs. non-GT admissions. Let’s not muddy the waters with baseless speculation, then, shall we? In any case, I was GT’d when I applied to transfer to ILR last spring and I wasn’t trying to “backdoor” my way into Cornell. I am genuinely interested in the ILR education, but I’m also planning on pursuing studies outside of the ILR School. Could I have been admitted as a frosh? It’s possible. My stats out of HS were quite good. Does that give me a free pass in your book?</p>

<p>Perhaps if you’d deign to speak with a mere ILR transfer when I get on campus in January I can buy you a beer and show you that I am just as intelligent, driven and, yes, proud as you. I hope you take me up on it!</p>

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<p>Thanks for the compliment weezyf ;)</p>

<p>Anyways, I am talking about transfers here not GTs. I never accused you of trying to “backdoor” your way in. I’m sure GTs have similar qualifications as the freshman admits.
I’m talking about the normal transfers who somehow make it in and start failing when they come. I do not know of a single engineering transfer who is doing well here. </p>

<p>And like I said before, I’m sure there are a lot of qualified transfers who do wonderful things for the school. However, if the whole process got more selective, Cornell would be able to keep those people while rejecting the people who couldn’t really handle the work here in the first place.</p>

<p>And if ILR doesn’t publish the number of GTs every year, they should at least state somewhere that the numbers it publishes includes GTs. Because by not doing that, it is misleading a lot of people. All the unqualified applicants will apply, thinking they have a shot after seeing the 50+% acceptance rate, and all the people from peer schools will look down on Cornell saying that “anyone” can get in.</p>

<p>And all you people who are saying I’m a snob for thinking like this,
Higher acceptance rate (less selectivity) = more “unqualified” people = decrease in prestige = lower ranking = lower quality applicants in the future</p>

<p>And I’m sure that all of you would love Cornell to keep moving down…</p>

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<p>A clarification: I applied as a “normal” transfer and they GT’d me instead of outright accepting me for Fall 2010 so I did feel a bit accused. That said, you seem to be more against CC transfers than those from top-30 universities so I’m sorry for getting caught up in my emotion.</p>

<p>I understand the thrust of your argument, but you’re creating this nebulous idea of the ex-CC surefire failure transfer. I think it’s disingenuous to write off people who could easily be just as intelligent as you, but there’s no sense in getting bogged down in an argument where we’re really both making solid points.</p>

<p>I don’t really buy your slippery slope about Cornell’s ranking or your point with regard to selectivity correlating to the amount of people who are truly “qualified.” Who’s to say that ILR doesn’t just self-select for a certain type of student? There are a lot of factors at play here.</p>

<p>I wholeheartedly agree that ILR should publish “true” transfers apart from GT’s. I had absolutely no idea where I stood in terms of the rate, but I guess I ended up alright.</p>

<p>Now I gotta finish my take-home midterm so they don’t un-GT me. Have a good one!</p>

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<p>@weezyf</p>

<p>Yes, I’m mostly talking about community college/state universitiy transfers (they seem to be the ones failing once they get here).</p>

<p>Now, I’m sure that there are students at community colleges who are much smarter than I. However, most of the community college transfers I’ve met are the type who blew off all of high school, partying all the time, got their act together at a CC, and transferred to Cornell. I think it’s really unfair that they get to slide in here when the freshman admits had to work their butts off in high school to get in, hence why I call it the “backdoor” (again, I’m not saying all CC students did that). I know some of you are thinking, “they got their act together, so why not give them a second chance?” Well, I think the “second chance” is a bit too generous and unfair to the freshman admits.</p>

<p>Reiterating…I just think that increasing selectivity (I am NOT against transfers, just too many of them) will help weed those people out. </p>

<p>This is just my opinion, obviously. You don’t have to agree with me, but I feel like I do have a point (and so do other students).</p>

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<p>I do believe ILR transfer acceptances include many GTs. Interestingly ILR freshman applications have shown large increases in recent years. For the ILR Class of 2014, 20% of applicants were accepted. CAS & Engineering accept relatively few transfers, with CAS admitting only 7% of transfer applicants.</p>

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<h2>I have posted this many times, the transfer rates include GT’s. The majority of transfers you will meet did have a GT, common sense says that GT’s plus 120 other transfers would produce a massive class, and the graduation numbers for ILR just do not support this.</h2>

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<h2>I have not heard this at all. We get plenty of applicants here each admissions cycle, yet at most it’s only a few hundred from the total 35,000 or so who apply. Yet dozens seem to get GT’s, wouldn’t it be incredible that while only a small percentage of applicants post here, the majority of students who also earned GT’s do?</h2>

<p>

and then…

= ???</p>

<hr>

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</p>

<h2>Some of the numbers I have seen suggest otherwise, but I’m sure you have a large enough of a sample to judge 7 weeks into the semester.</h2>

<p>

how about form an opinion based on the actual numbers? Yield is consistently between 60 and 65% for the ILR school. Compare that to CAS or Engineering which are consistently between 38 and 41%. The problem is, the colleges can NOT increase their freshmen class size (a slightly larger than expected yield is causing problems anyways). Offering GT’s to qualified students is a way to increase enrollment, and this is what a good number of colleges are trying.</p>

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<p>@gomestar</p>

<p>I wasn’t singling out just ILR. Even in engineering, there are transfers from CCs who fall under my argument. I said that the acceptance rate for engineering transfers is a lot more reasonable, not that all the transfers to engineering are “qualified” while those to ILR are not. So, I’m not really contradicting myself.</p>

<p>Plus, about your yield argument. I’m guessing (not sure) if you look at the stats of A&S and Engineering vs the stats of ILR, the former two are higher (SAT/GPA/Class Rank are around the same as HYP), probably meaning the cross-admit battles with other ivies happen in those two colleges the most. Colleges like ILR accept based more on “fit” and not on pure numbers, which engineering and A&S are more heavy on. Therefore, there are probably less cross-admit battles with other ivies due to a large portion of people applying to ILR/Ag/Hotel have it as their first choice while applicants to engineering may not necessarily have Cornell as their first choice.</p>

<p>Also, what made you think I was a freshman? I’m not.</p>

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<p>

the problem, as I see it, is that you do not have an argument. I think you have a complaint based on your personal interactions and observations, and you complain because it is something that bothers you. I agree that you would have an argument if there was some data to back it up (such as transfer pass/fail rates, or GT vs. non-GT admit rate), but the university does not release these statistics and it causes people to make broad assumptions. Having worked closely with admissions when I was an undergrad not too long ago, I can say that you are off base in many regards, but I cannot detail much more beyond this. I also think it is unfair of you to judge the success of certain groups of students at Cornell based only on the pool of people you know, CC transfers or not.</p>

<p>

right, I agree, I was merely addressing the “ILR probably struggles with recruitment the most” where the numbers (again, the assumptions vs. facts thing) prove otherwise.</p>

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<p>as has been states a large amount of those 123 transfers are GTs so the actual acceptance rate is a lot lower than those numbers would suggest. Also transfer applicant pools are very different than freshmen applicant pools, you would probably only apply to transfer to ILR if you were actually a pretty decent candidate.</p>

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<p>^I would have to disagree with your second statement Prism.</p>

<p>Since no one has the actual statistics for GTs, I can’t really refute your statement about the skewed acceptance rate. However, it seems that you’re saying that the transfer applicant pool is stronger than that of the freshman. I don’t necessarily agree with that because during the freshman app process, a big portion of the applicants consists of top students who are competitive enough to get into HYPSM and the other ivies. A lot of these students apply to Cornell just to have a “fallback” top school in case they fail to get into any of the above schools. </p>

<p>However, during the transfer app process, the majority of applicants are students who didn’t make it into Cornell during the freshman process or students who didn’t apply for freshman because they thought their stats weren’t up to par. The point being, during the transfer round, the top competitive students who got into other ivies/top schools (who did apply for freshman) don’t apply, making the pool of applicants a bit “weaker” than the freshman round. I can’t really imagine why someone from HYPSM/other ivies would apply to Cornell for transfer (I’m not saying it doesn’t happen though). </p>

<p>Transfer applicants to schools like Yale probably consist of many other ivy league students, yet they still take only 3-5% of them. Cornell takes around 30% (all colleges combined). Even after taking GTs into consideration, it’s probably over 20%. Hence, my point from the beginning: the transfer process for Cornell needs to get much more selective.</p>

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<p>haha literally the person who started this thread has to stop crying… ur pathetic</p>

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<p>Wow, backdoor… I was thinking something else entirely ;)</p>

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<p><a href=“http://i34.■■■■■■■.com/2lvd5xx.gif[/url]”>http://i34.■■■■■■■.com/2lvd5xx.gif&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>hahahahahahahahahahaa</p>

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<p>In my experience, a lot of guaranteed transfer students come from financially strapped families. I assume Cornell wants them but doesn’t want to carry them for 4 years financially, so the GT is a compromise that serves both ends. </p>

<p>Also remember that ILR draws a more targeted population than, for example, CAS. The architecture school (best in the nation) has amongst the highest admit rate and lowest test scores in the university because the few who do apply are a very focused population with a different skillset. </p>

<p>So, bottom line, I wouldn’t read too much into these numbers.</p>