<p>I wouldn’t dare take on a helicopter mom. Her arguments carry little weight because they belie my experience at USC. The vast majority of USC transfers were screw ups in high school and partied too much to get into USC as freshmen. Then they realized what screw ups they were and went to lousy ccs where they aced the courses, no great feat, and then coasted into USC with their parents’ financial aid. The exceptions were the three friends of mine who transferred from UCLA, and two from Pomona.</p>
<p>“Not Everyone Can Be A USC Undergrad” but according to you, any screw up who attends CC and aces his class can. Oh the irony!</p>
<p>I love how you assume that nearly everyone who transfers to USC is/was a screw up and that their parents are poor and thus qualifying them for financial aid.</p>
<p>No, my point is that USC should not be perceived of as a place anyone has a right to attend, even by transferring, any more than anyone has the right to transfer into Harvard or Stanford. It annoys most of us four-year USC grads that kids think all they need is an intense desire to attend USC and that, if they work their butts off at some cc, they deserve to get in. No, they don’t.</p>
<p>And, the screw up transfers don’t generally qualify for aid; their parents pay full freight.</p>
<p>The idea that people only go to community college because they’re too dumb to get into a good four-year university is ridiculous. And arrogant. Half the people I know with degrees from Cal spent their first two years at a CC. They did it for financial reasons and/or because they needed to stay near their homes. My guess is that’s the same story at UCLA.</p>
<p>I’ve only taken a few CC courses, but I found them to be just as good as the freshman/sophomore classes that I took at a “real” university. The classes at the CCs were a lot smaller, with more attention given to each student.</p>
<p>
The information I posted is backed by numerous studies. The information you have posted is based on one student’s experiences (and based on the age posted on your profile - 45 -, one student’s experiences more than TWENTY years ago).
You are displaying ignorance about USC financial aid (please see my FAQ about financial aid for additional information): USC offers the same financial aid to transfers as to freshmen. This is because USC clearly recognizes the value of their transfer students.</p>
<p>USC has no plans to reduce their transfer numbers. If you were able to think critically, you would see that if the transfer class was reduced, the freshman class would necessarily be increased which would reduce selectivity and cause a drop in the rankings. In addition, the 6-year graduation rate would fall without the superior 4-year graduation rate transfers are proven to accomplish, again resulting in a drop in the rankings.</p>
<p>You have provided nothing to support your arguments, and it is clear transfers have no negative effect on rankings - only positive effects as described above.
I continue to be curious as to what in my posts you have found that supports your classifying me as a “helicopter mom.” You have done as little to support that accusation as your other unsupported statements.</p>
<p>OP,</p>
<p>I’m a transfer student, but I came from a (top-50, if you really need to know that) 4-year university from the east coast. It’s too bad you generalize CC transfers. If it’s based off of your negative experiences with these students, it’s purely coincidental and not fair to say they are undeserving of being here. I’ve met plenty of bright CC transfer students. It’s disheartening to see someone who carries such a negative attitude toward transfer students. You really have to understand that people who didn’t come into USC as a freshman are no lesser than those who did. There are so many factors, including finance issues, personal problems, etc. I know a few students who chose to go to a CC over NYU/USC so they can transfer after two years to decrease the cost of tuition. They successfully did. </p>
<p>And that whole thing about transfers financial aid is just not true at all. Sure, some students’ parents can afford the tuition…good for them. But some of us rely on USC financial aid. I got an incredibly generous FA package from USC, more than I could’ve possibly imagined. Not only that, but I work and intern while being a full student here, and so do many other transfer students. And my grades don’t suck! CC or not, we are no lesser than any other students at SC.</p>
<p>@seattle
All of it</p>
<p>All of you miss the point: transfers dilute the quality of USC while unfairly penalizing the freshman class. You are essentially arguing that USC should be composed of transfers, something that is the antithesis of the traditional collegiate experience. Why should not Stanford and Princeton do the same? In fact, let’s do away with the freshman class altogether to appease the hoards of cc transfers who want to save a few bucks. USC will never crack the top 20 with such backward thinking.</p>
<p>It is you who are missing the point - you have in no way supported any of your statements, while others have provided strong support for theirs.</p>
<p>In your latest post, you have done the same: In what way do transfers “dilute” the quality of USC? In what way do transfers “penalize” fresmen admits? You have offered nothing to support your statements, and the reason is clear: there is no support for those statements.</p>
<p>And you, my dear, cannot refute my conclusions because you erroneously believe USC should open its doors to anyone who wants to be a USC Trojan.</p>
<p>I have thoroughly refuted your “conclusions,” and it appears you are the only one on the forum who is unaware of that fact.</p>
<p>I believe that USC should admit the best of the best, and that is what they are currently doing.</p>
<p>“USC should stop rewarding kids who believe they can save money by attending a cc and then transferring into USC like it’s an entitlement. That behavior is unfair to those who spend all four years at USC.”
Because shelling over a tremendous amount of money for anything isn’t of a concern to people right? We all have our reasons for doing something and that reason may not be apparent to you or anyone else. It fulfills our requirements, our needs. Not yours. Your opinion, especially if it’s foreign, bears little on our decision.</p>
<p>“It annoys most of us four-year USC grads that kids think all they need is an intense desire to attend USC and that, if they work their butts off at some cc, they deserve to get in. No, they don’t.”</p>
<p>What kids are you speaking to? What four-year USC grads are you representing? You’re envisioning a reality where you somehow have the general vibe of the people you’re referring to when in reality; the scope of your perspective isn’t as wide as you believe it to be. And what of the aspiring engineering students who have taken all mathematics courses up to DiffEq, physics, and even some engineering courses(which most likely don’t transfer) and do well in them? Oh and they love the feeling of belonging to the Trojan Family? Wait, that doesn’t matter? Working hard coupled with academic/social success doesn’t confer any sort of advantage in a selective admissions process? I don’t get you man. </p>
<p>Don’t marginalize the transfer students who are very well qualified. You don’t know them. You cannot judge if their educational quality is below USC’s. Hell, I could even argue that the physics course at a CC is WAAAYY more difficult, more rewarding than USC’s. There’s a standard of educational quality that is ideal for each educational institute, but in reality, is that standard as rigid as you think? USC is an institution run by people. Do those people like the professors, faculty, all share your views? No. And by what USC gradient are you comparing transfer students to? The engineers? The frat boys and sorority girls?</p>
<p>One can have an intense desire to attend USC, but in no way does that confer an absolute reason to accept them. That process isn’t existent in an admissions process like USC. We all know how powerful the feeling of belonging to USC is. It’s so powerful, it’s convinced you that the next 17 generations of your family must attend there. So when this basic quality of a “true” USC student is displayed amongst the application pool, what is the next thing to judge? It would be their academics, their EC’s, their personalities, etc. It goes along the lines of, if everyone is special, no one is special.
All of you miss the point: transfers dilute the quality of USC while unfairly penalizing the freshman class. You are essentially arguing that USC should be composed of transfers, something that is the antithesis of the traditional collegiate experience. Why should not Stanford and Princeton do the same? In fact, let’s do away with the freshman class altogether to appease the hoards of cc transfers who want to save a few bucks. USC will never crack the top 20 with such backward thinking.</p>
<p>If you really have an issue with the selection of who is admitted to transfer to USC, then bring your concerns to them. Do you know how many transfer students were admitted to the Viterbi Engineering School for the Fall of 2011? Around 250. Yeah. Low number, and Viterbi believed that these students were capable of handling the workload of their engineering program. Each college has their own requirements and attributes they look for in their application pool. The issue of a diluted USC quality thus falls on the respective college within the entire USC framework. Again, what standard are you holding transfer students to? School of Cinematic Arts don’t admit students on mathematic courses. They don’t give a damn about that. They want visionary film makers and such. Not an applicant who knows what the tensor strength of a steel beam is. </p>
<p>And transfer students are people too. They have their own experiences and talents to bring to USC and really, that applies to any other college. That student who is set for all four years at USC might just find their best friend who just transferred from a CC. Interpersonal relationship qualities are not yours to judge. And I honestly doubt those who have responded to you are arguing for a college based entirely on transfer students. Look, I know you have good intentions because you love the traditions and everything that USC stands for but honestly, the way you’re relaying your love comes off as very discriminatory. There are some genuinely great students who begin at CC’s and I do hope you don’t view them with the same flavor of disdain as you do now. They’re as varied as society itself.</p>
<p>The thing that drives me nuts with Seattle’s thinking (and I’m sympathetic to it, up to a point) is that it’s typical of the usual “born on third base and think they hit a triple” crowd which makes up a significant portion of the student body at USC. Seattle said that he went to a private high school. I went to a private grade school and a public high school and, having been half and half (public community college plus USC) I loathe the public schools.</p>
<p>Most of the best students I knew from community college (I have friends who started in CCs who are now tenure-track university professors and several others earned Ivy League graduate degrees) either had something happen to them in high school like I did (my father had a bout of cancer and was wasting away with a chronic illness, and he’d been the sole breadwinner) like an incredibly ugly divorce or a cross-country move or an abortion, OR they were classic victims of the soft bigotry of low expectations. If you’re a kid with a 150 IQ but your parents don’t speak English or wash dishes for a living, people have a way of assuming that all you’ll ever be capable of is what your parents achieved or didn’t achieve. Take that kid and give him limited economic resources, little cultural know-how, and put him in a garden-variety overcrowded underfunded public high school in a place like East L.A. or Riverside or Long Beach and people assume a totally different life trajectory than if that kid had been a middle of the pack student at Harvard-Westlake. The HW kid gets introduced to Ivy League admissions officers and has parents and friends who are alumni and write letters of recommendation, whereas the other kid is left to flail and the teachers and guidance counselors who could help him generally don’t give a s—.</p>
<p>Let’s also not forget the “save a few bucks” straw man argument because it meshes PERFECTLY with the “born on third base and think you hit a triple” mentality. The median income nationwide nowadays is something like $45,000 which is a nice way of saying that half of Americans earn LESS than that. Yes, there are plenty of problems with that arbitrary statistic but nonetheless it’s a good starting off point. By comparison, USC now costs roughly $60,000 a year, or a third MORE than what the average person/household nationwide makes.</p>
<p>If you’re a garden-variety middle class family in a place like Thousand Oaks or Santa Clarita (Oaks Christian doesn’t count) making, say, $80,000 a year, how exactly are you going to afford to send your kids to a school like USC? Many parents balk at that to begin with, which is part of the reason why the underlying divide between USC and UCLA is based on class and nothing else. If CA has a robust CC system, of course parents are going to steer their kids towards that. It’s common sense, and the university is choosing to admit those students because it’s had a fantastic track record with them, and the people upset by it are the usual “born on third base and think they hit a triple” folks because unfortunately some of them aren’t exactly aware of the struggles the average folks have these days.</p>
<p>I don’t begrudge anyone wealth but alas people in the upper upper class can be just as backwards and provincial as rednecks in rural Mississippi, but in an elitist kind of way. There’s nothing wrong with making or having money so long as you’re aware of the bubble in which you exist.</p>
<p>You people think that because you transferred into USC you are on the same playing field as freshmen. You are not, other than those who matriculated at counterparts like the u of c or similar privates. HYSP reward high achieving high schoolers by offering a select few admission to the freshman class. Stanford accepts fewer than 250 transfers a year. Princeton accepts zero transfers. USC accepts more transfers each year than HYSP combined. I want USC to be better than it was or is. The rest of you do not. USC will never achieve greatness until it closes backdoor admissions.</p>
<p>OP, you seem to want your undergrad college name to tell people you were a top HS student, like a label. If USC admits top CC students and other high achieving transfers, it seems to bug you a lot that some middling HS students can catch up and get to USC, too. In other words, unlike Harvard or Princeton, attending USC doesn’t label you a top top HS achiever. But… this is just not important in real life to most people. Not to employers. Not to grad schools. The next steps one takes really don’t depend on high school performance. This must really disappoint those kids for whom high school was a terrible ordeal in order to excel in every class and to whom taking the most APs meant they were ahead. I suggest you take a wider view of what really is valuable and see, perhaps, that high school is way in the rear view mirror.</p>
<p>USC, I suspect, is more interested in where their undergrads (both freshman admits and transfers) are going than where they came from. Their past records (whether HS or CC or other U) is evidence they can succeed, not a gold chip to be cashed in. And after they leave USC, we see a great deal of successful graduates. This seems to be across the board, not simply those super achievers who have been on a straight and fast track from 8th grade or earlier.</p>
<p>I’m not sure when you attended USC. The qualifications for admission have zoomed in the past 2 decades and the atmosphere on campus is not one of division as you suggest.</p>
<p>You’re too obsessed with prestige, SeattleTW. </p>
<p>Raising the quality of USC’s research and graduate programs is more important than reducing the number of transfers.</p>
<p>Seattle, do you believe that excellence and equity are mutually exclusive values?</p>
<p>Well said MadBean</p>
<p>I don’t believe in equity as you define that term. I believe in meritocracy. To you, college preparation begins at high school graduation; to me, it began as a high school freshman. And contrary to your belief, when I told prospective employers I went to USC, many asked whether I went all four years, especially other USC grads. Clearly I was perceived of more favorably. USC does have a hierarchy, and four year grads are and will always remain at the top, with the exception of those who transferred in from other USC counterparts, and those very few who, but for extenuating circumstances, would have entered as freshmen.</p>
<p>Since when is transferring in treated as an entitlement? Yes, students can save money, but many of those same students could perhaps attend USC for 4 (or more) years, and require financial aid during those years.</p>
<p>There is nothing wrong with transfer admissions, though trying to compare the success of such students with those who go straight to a 4-year school is like comparing apples and oranges. The proper comparison would be transfers vs. classmates who have already completed the first 2 years at the 4-year school with adequate progress. Those who don’t do well at CC don’t make it through the transfer process, while they might have been admitted as first-year students.</p>
<p>Transfer admissions are considered in the same way first-year admits are considered - in the context of the program they transfer from. If there is an articulation agreement, it is because the sending school provides an adequate preparation for the 4-year school. If anything, they are more structured and strict than the program followed in the first 2 years in a 4-year school. Further, it is easier to stay in a 4-year school with poor graders than it is to transfer in from a CC.</p>
<p>If transfer students are coming in from CC with great grades, but poor preparation, I could see the argument, but that is not happening - those CC students being admitted as transfers are the top of their class, and are well prepared; well enough in many cases to finish in a total of 4 years.</p>