I’m being lazy…I know, but I was wondering because my hs grades are not ivy league quality I received a B/C average GPA in hs.
If it were me, and I was planning to apply to an Ivy as a transfer student, I would take the effort to look up each Ivy I was interested in and see the actual application requirements for transfer students.
A friend of my D’s complained in HS because she said her guidance counselor gave her the wrong application deadline to a school she planned to apply to, and she missed the deadline. I don’t know if the guidance counselor made a mistake or if she was just blaming him for her own mistake, but to me there are times you don’t want to rely on the possible mis-information of others.
This can be found easily online if you look up the requirements for each school. If you too lazy to do that, I suggest you don’t apply to Ivy League colleges. And the requirements may be different depending on if you transfer after one or two years of college.
Considering how bleak the odds are of being admitted into one of these schools as a transfer student, HS transcript would seem to be the least of the hurdles.
Ivies are not looking for lazy transfer students.
“my hs grades are not ivy league quality I received a B/C average GPA in hs. .”
then dont even bother. those Ivy level colleges that do accept transfer applications require and look closely at HS transcripts.
consider this-
Why would any Ivy, which turns away thousands of freshman applicants with far higher GPA’s than yours, lower their standards and consider accepting you as a transfer student??
Just because someone is too lazy to look up a website on one particular day doesn’t mean they can’t handle Ivy League-level work or that they’re lazy in all aspects of life. I certainly consider myself lazy in certain areas of my life, and I have an Ivy grad degree I worked my butt off for. (Although it is true that you don’t always want to rely on information passed on from others; it can frequently be wrong.)
To answer the question, OP: Yes, every Ivy does require a high school transcript (and SAT or ACT scores) from transfer students. So do other top schools like MIT, Stanford, Vanderbilt, Duke, Amherst, Swarthmore, and Williams. (to be clear, I checked the transfer admissions page of each university/college to be sure.) The requirements don’t differ whether you are applying to transfer in as a sophomore or a junior. Most of these places seem to prefer sophomore transfers.
Transfer spots are usually created by students who leave a college before they graduate. However, very few people leave these top schools before they graduate - they admit only the best applicants so few people leave because they are struggling, and their student bodies are relatively affluent and they have excellent financial aid, so people rarely need to leave because they can’t afford it any longer. Because of that, there are very few slots to transfer into, and transferring is even more competitive than freshman admissions. You need to not only have an exceptional high school and college record, but evidence of leadership on your college campus and a clear, compelling reason for transfer. It has to be about your comfort and fitting in at your current college.
These universities also prefer to take students from peer institutions. Vanderbilt says it right on their transfer admissions page. The others don’t mention it explicitly, but I’ve advised some Columbia transfer students and the vast majority of them transferred from peer institutions.
You can almost completely undo the power of disappointing HS grades by getting a 3.7+ in college. Knock it out of the park in college, and transfer targets will care a lot less about what happened in HS, especially if you’re applying with two or more semesters of grades on the books. I got into Harvard, Stanford, and Penn as a transfer with a 3.9 college GPA and straight Fs in high school. I’ve seen others do roughly the same thing many times in the last 15 years.
I disagree with menloparkmom. The whole point of using HS transcripts in the admissions process is to predict college performance. If you have an applicant with 2 or more semesters of ACTUAL college performance, why would you care what the predictors have to say?
Me too. Cornell requires “Official secondary/high school and all college transcripts” See http://admissions.cornell.edu/apply/transfer-applicants/transfer-application-checklist
The number of transfer students varies… Princeton takes none, while Cornell’s incoming transfer students number about a sixth of its number of incoming frosh.
Colleges vary in where they prefer transfer students to come from. While some super-selective schools may prefer to take them from other super-selective schools, Stanford historically has taken about half of its (few dozen per year) transfer students from community colleges (e.g. http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/september/new-student-orientation-091712.html ).
High school record is more important for sophomore level transfers than for junior level transfers, since junior level transfers have more of a college record to show.
^^^^It should be noted that a good portion of Cornell’s transfer students were actually accepted in HS as part of the university’s guaranteed sophomore transfer option…
And Cornell is somewhat unique among the Ivy League schools in having articulation agreements with some CCs.
My college grad year is 2018, can I apply for Fall 2017 also being that it will be my senior year in college(I might graduate a semester late though because I did start college a semester late in Spring 2015)
If you started in spring 2015, then you would graduate after eight semesters after completing fall 2018. So transferring fall 2017 would be at the junior + one semester level (i.e. you have completed five semesters, with three more to go). You may want to check whether each school has a residency requirement that may require you to stay four semesters after transfer, or if your major has enough unique courses at the school that you would need four semesters to complete them all.
@ucbalumnus but I’ve taken a 15 credit course load since I’ve started. so I’ll possibly be caught up with spring 18 and graduate then, but i don’t know yet.
Most colleges require 120-128 credits or equivalent to graduate, which would be 8 semesters of 15-16 credit course loads.
12 credits per semester is typically the minimum to be “full time” for financial aid purposes, but that would typically require 10 semesters to graduate if you did not have credit going in (e.g. AP credit, college credit earned while in high school, etc.).
I have 30 credits so far meaning I’m only behind by 4 credits, I’ll be taking a summer course also, so I will have caught up, not to forget I’ll be taking 15 credits for the spring 2016 semester.