So both my HS and college GPA are around 3.8, and my ACT score is 34. I worked for a company related to AI system and did a continuous volunteering. Now, I wanna transfer to more prestigious colleges, especially Columbia University and Cornell since I love what some of their professors research about. So, how hard is it to transfer Top 20 colleges including Ivy colleges? Do I even have a chance?
Difficult, but not for the same reasons you think.
Your stats aren’t the only thing that plays a part in transfer admissions to top colleges, especially Ivy Leagues.
They want top students, that’s quite obvious, but they receive applications from thousands of top students every application cycle. And, in Ivy Leagues, there are only 5-10 spots open for transfer students.
Since you have very good stats, I do think you should apply, but do not think that there are clear cut numbers you need to meet in order guarantee an acceptance from an Ivy League school.
It’s even harder to transfer into an Ivy League than it is to get into them for freshman year. It’s not impossible, but sometimes you’re looking at acceptance rates even lower than their freshman acceptance rates.
It varies from school to school, even within the top 20. Vanderbilt’s transfer acceptance rate is around 30%, substantially higher than its overall acceptance rate. Cornell’s transfer rate in 2015 was also a bit higher than its acceptance rate for incoming freshman, about 19%. Other schools are about the same as their overall freshman acceptance rate (Northwestern, IIRC). And, at some schools it’s virtually impossible—Princeton just started taking transfers again after not taking any for almost 30 years and Stanford took 20 out of more than 2,000 applicants. (I couldn’t find any data on Columbia with a quick Google search, but Barnard had a transfer acceptance rate of around 20% in 2015.)
I think Cornell’s transfer acceptance rate is skewed by their articulation agreements with state schools.
One piece that you do have that makes a difference is a specific reason for the ‘why’ question, which matters even more in transferring.
As far as I’m aware, all the universities named above do admissions by college. The component colleges are not all identically the same as each other, and do not necessarily have identical admissions pools. So the aggregate admit % for the whole university may have limited insight regarding chances when applying to a particular one of its colleges.
In the past,. Cornell published admissions stats by college , buried somewhere in its Institutional Research pages. I’m not sure that it still does produce this. But when it did, and I looked, the transfer admit % for its arts & sciences college was about the same as for that college’s freshman admit %.
Some of the “contract colleges” were less selective for transfer admission. Possibly in part due to afore-mentioned articulation agreements, and so-called “guaranteed transfers”, I can’t say. But if you apply to a particular college there, you have to fulfill that college’s requirements. So you’d best actually want that course of studies.
If this comes across in your application it will be a likely rejection.
If admitted your chances of having these professors in your classes are low.
@monydad, I know that for transfers, at Northwestern, while the specialty colleges do their own admitting by college, Weinberg and Tech (CAS and Engineering) are one big pool and Admissions handles admissions.
Northwestern used to provide admissions breakdowns by college, just like Cornell did. Weinberg and tech were listed separately, just as its other colleges were. As for these two particular colleges (and arguably engineering is no less a specialty college than the others) they are still filling different “buckets”, even if the same staff is assigned to fill more than one of them…
@monydad: I don’t know what it was like back in the day at NU, but what I’m telling you is how it is now. As I mentioned, NU Admissions treats CAS and Engineering transfer applicants as one big pool which mean they don’t fill particular buckets (at least buckets by major; they may do so by demographics).