College admission is a complex things, but agree or disagree with some practices, you can usually see the logic behind them. I can’t figure out the logic though behind OSU passing on some excellent students as incoming freshman, and then turning right around and admitting transfers with far worse stats. It would take a year or so to balance out, and for a time there would more under classmen than upper, but wouldn’t the student body as a whole soon be higher caliber students if they accepted more high achievement freshman and fewer average student transfers?
I worked at admissions at my previous college and from what I have experienced, the freshman has much more privilege when it comes to admissions, scholarships, grants, and social opportunities.
When a person is applying as a freshman, admissions are only looking at high school performance. A high school student isn’t going to be denied because a transfer took their spot. As those admitted high school students drop out, transfers are going to replace them. This is why freshman and transfers aren’t compared to one another and are in two separate categories when it comes to admission.
High school stats can’t be compared to college stats. When you’re in college, you’ll soon find what you did in high school won’t matter. The mental workload in college is harder to carry. I know plenty of students who were at the top of their class in high school, but failed when it came to college. And vise-versa. College classes are going to be more rigorous and college life will require maturity. Statistically, transfer students are more likely to graduate and continue to keep up their academic performance. They have experience since they’re already in college.
Also, OSU admits about 24,000 high school students a year and only 2,000 transfers… so I don’t think they need to accept more high school students and fewer transfers. If there are not many people applying as transfers, admission will be less competitive for transfers as well.
Seems reasonable and logical to me.
The logic is money, of course. Transfer students don’t require scholarships and the school doesn’t have to report their sub-average stats to the national publications that do the rankings. It’s a double win–how OSU gets to have its cake and eat it too.
All public universities get away with doing this. It’s how they “cook their books,” so to speak. Even Berkeley is easy to get into if you’re a transfer student. But I agree that it’s annoying when you’re in classes with people who just … quite obviously don’t belong there. Or when you’re picking up the slack for group members who can’t pull their weight. But that’s the way it rolls at a public university–the school is charged with educating a wide cross-section of the population, and taking transfers is part of that. .