Guaranteed transfer Admission for 2014--Unethical????

[ucbalumnus]

<p>

@TomSrOfBoston

Based on these posts it appears that BU is telling some 2013 applicants to enrol at another college for their freshman year, get a 3.0, and you are guaranteed admission as a transfer in 2014.</p>

<p>This strikes me as highly unethical. It will hurt the other colleges’ retention and graduation rates and deny a space to another applicant to that college for whom it may have been their first choice.</p>

<p>Thoughts??

</p>

<p>It is not uncommon.</p>

<p>For example, UT Austin tells some students to enroll at another UT campus with guaranteed transfer if they meet a minimum GPA at the other UT campus. And many public universities have transfer guarantee programs for same-state community college students.</p>

<p>There also seems to be an increasing trend of offering admission to start in the spring semester at the school’s choice as a load balancing tool (generally, the fall semester is more heavily enrolled than the spring semester, due to early or late graduates having the odd semester be a fall semester; US News rating cynics may also note that it may get the slightly lower stats spring admits out of the fall stats for US News ratings). However, the usual choices offered to spring admits for the fall are to attend community college, attend a special program on the main campus with limited course selection, or not attend college at all, rather than attend any college for the fall.</p>

<p>In the BU case, a student may find it to be a way to go to BU at 3/4 the price by going to community college for the first year (assuming that BU allows community college for the first year for this guaranteed transfer program).</p>