How my economics classes match up to choice transfer's

Transfer Students
1

I am at a California community college seeking to transfer to Stanford for an economics major. I reviewed the student handbook for Stanford economics majors, and they surely have my dream of having almost every economic subject under the sun available in courses to them, which is one of the reasons why I intend to transfer. I am exhausting all the economics classes at my community college, but, I definitely know it’s not enough to square up to 4-year students at Stanford. For example, my Principles of Microecon and Principles of Macroecon, regardless of the As I got in them both, account for only the basic Econ class there!

I will be meeting with a counselor soon to talk about this newfound realization, but, what I wanted to ask is if applying to a major with few actual transferrable core classes under my belt is going to work against me in admissions? I’m already stuck at this JC for 3+ years because I am an Army Reservist who’s been pulled away a bunch, and I was actually studying to be a police officer before I worked as an active duty intelligence analyst and decided from work that international economics is where I want to be. I anticipate that if I get accepted to Stanford, I will definitely be there for 3+ years too, simply because I’ll have to make up for a lot of credits.

Thanks for your time.

2

It is not just at Stanford that your CC economics courses cover only introductory economics (which may be one course or two courses, depending on the school). The other prerequisites that you can take at CC are math courses.

Stanford’s economics major is math heavy, so you should try to take multivariable calculus, linear algebra, and differential equations at CC before transfer. Stanford also requires calculus-based statistics, which is rarely available at CCs. Some other schools are also similarly math-heavy. But some other schools may only need single variable calculus and may not require statistics to be calculus-based.