My daughter is a sophomore at a small private college. She hates it. Too small, too conservative. I knew she didn’t like it and tried to get her to transfer before her Sophomore year began, but she felt she was a failure for disliking it so much–so she tried to tough it out. Until now.
She has a 3.2. And good SAT scores.
She wants to drop out now (3 weeks into Spring Semester), to use the rest of the spring semester to look at transfer colleges and work on applications.
Would admissions at a new transfer school see this as a “warning sign”? Would it hurt her chances of getting accepted as a transfer student?
Should she just power through the semester–maintain her 3.2–and work on her transfer applications on weekends/breaks? She has 4 or 5 schools in mind.
Getting W’s for all of those classes wouldn’t be too good. At the very least she would have to explain those W’s to admissions. How competitive are the schools that she is considering?
She needs to find out if sche can still leave without W grades.
Will she get any money back at this date? Will she need to repay any financial aid?
Frankly, it is better to be supportive and help her exit as fast as possible, than for her to just take it into her head and walk even later in the semester.
I think it depends on which colleges she’s aiming to transfer to, as the above posters have already said.
Most colleges will be forgiving of a semester of Ws if her overall stats are good, or if there’s a compelling reason for dropping out. Even better, if she does something meaningful with her time while she’s away from school.
However, a 3.2 is on the low end of most top-tier colleges for transfer admission. So if she’s trying to transfer to her state school or to, say, a 2nd tier school, she’s fine. If she’s trying to transfer to a top school, she needs to get much better grades than a 3.2 to begin with regardless of whether she leaves or not.