Hello
If for financial reasons a student were to attend a local Texas community college (live at home while attending…), for example Collin County College in McKinney, TX (LINK: http://www.collin.edu/academics/index.html ), and obtain an Associates Degree in Computer Science, with the plan to transfer to a large state university, such as UT Austin/Texas A&M and graduate with a BS in Computer Science, is this “do-able” ? Do their admissions offices “frown on” these types of candidates and instead prefer 4 year applicants ?
High School grades excellent, plays sports, volunteers in community, may earn Eagle Scout rank in a few years, etc etc.
Any suggestions/etc on this topic ?
Thank You
@bill2016 I’m not sure and will let others answer that. But I would like to encourage you to consider UT Dallas as well. They have an excellent CS program and also offer a lot of merit aid.
I’m a current dual credit student at Collin College, and it’s a decent school. Collin has a few automatic transfer programs a few good schools such as UT Dallas and Texas Tech which may interest you.
It’s hard to say which one is more difficult for admissions. For UT in specific, as a freshman student there is approximately a 15-20% acceptance rate which is very difficult. If you were to apply after two years at Collin, you’d be a transfer student which means you’d compete against a completely different batch of kids either internally transferring (from say UT Liberal Arts to Computer science) or externally from another university or community college.
The thing about transfer student applicants is that acceptance rates can differ each year. Transfer students basically get the open spots from students who graduate early or drop out/transfer out of computer science. A big problem (I can only speak on behalf of UT) is that many students are taking longer that 4 years to graduate, so each year they are there is one less student who can transfer in.
With that said, a transfer to UT Computer Science (a top 10 program) is extremely difficult. They don’t publish any numbers, but my guess is that it would be more difficult than freshman admissions.
Texas A&M would be less difficult to get into, but not easy by any means. Both schools have requirements of which courses you need in order to transfer in, so be aware of those.
https://admissions.utexas.edu/explore/prerequisites
http://admissions.tamu.edu/transfer/apply
http://www.collin.edu/transferu/Pre-admnProg.html