<p>61.6% CUNY Bernard M Baruch College
54.1% University of Central Florida
52.5% The University of Texas at Dallas
47.3% University of Maryland-Baltimore County
44.8% University of California-San Diego
44.6% SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry
43.5% University of North Carolina Wilmington
39.0% Illinois Institute of Technology
37.9% New Jersey Institute of Technology
37.0% University of California-Davis
36.6% University at Buffalo
35.2% Stony Brook University
34.9% University of California-Los Angeles
34.5% University of California-Berkeley
32.9% University of Southern California
32.6% University of Maryland-College Park
31.5% Drexel University
29.7% University of South Carolina-Columbia
29.0% Florida State University
28.1% Clemson University
27.7% SUNY College at Geneseo
27.6% University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
27.2% Milwaukee School of Engineering
26.6% Saint Louis University-Main Campus
26.5% Columbia University in the City of New York
25.9% SUNY at Binghamton
25.9% The University of Texas at Austin
25.8% Rutgers University-New Brunswick
25.7% University of California-Santa Barbara
25.6% University of Washington-Seattle Campus
25.5% Ohio State University-Main Campus
24.7% Missouri University of Science and Technology
22.9% Auburn University
22.3% University of Massachusetts Amherst
22.2% Hofstra University
22.1% New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology
21.9% University of Miami
21.8% University of Iowa
21.7% Chapman University
21.7% University of Florida
21.5% University of Connecticut
21.5% Texas Christian University
20.4% University of Pittsburgh-Pittsburgh Campus
20.4% Georgia Institute of Technology-Main Campus
20.1% Loyola Marymount University
19.8% Rochester Institute of Technology
19.6% University of Georgia
19.5% University of Denver
19.3% University of the Pacific
19.3% University of San Diego
18.5% University of Richmond
18.5% University of Wisconsin-Madison
17.9% North Carolina State University at Raleigh
17.6% New York University
17.6% Texas A & M University-College Station
17.5% Emerson College
17.2% Purdue University-Main Campus
17.0% Gustavus Adolphus College
16.8% George Washington University
16.6% American University
16.4% University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
16.4% University of Tulsa
16.2% University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
16.1% The College of New Jersey
16.1% Southern Methodist University
15.9% Michigan Technological University
15.8% California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo
15.5% University of Vermont
15.4% Fordham University
15.3% Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
15.3% University of Virginia-Main Campus
14.6% Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art
14.6% Drake University
13.9% Northeastern University
13.9% Santa Clara University
13.5% Johns Hopkins University
13.5% Cornell University
13.4% College of William and Mary
13.2% Truman State University
13.1% Pepperdine University
12.9% Baylor University
12.5% Bentley University
12.3% University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
12.2% New College of Florida
12.0% Emory University
11.8% Gonzaga University
11.6% Brigham Young University-Provo
11.6% Southwestern University
11.3% Kettering University
11.3% Polytechnic Institute of New York University
11.0% Vanderbilt University
10.7% Clarkson University
10.3% Claremont McKenna College
10.1% Stevens Institute of Technology
10.1% Wheaton College
9.8% Thomas Aquinas College
9.3% Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
9.3% Colorado School of Mines
9.2% University of Rochester
8.6% University of Portland
8.5% Marquette University
8.0% Washington University in St Louis
7.9% Georgetown University
7.6% Beloit College
7.4% Illinois Wesleyan University
7.4% University of Puget Sound
7.1% University of Pennsylvania
7.1% Miami University-Oxford
7.1% Villanova University
6.9% Occidental College
6.5% Tulane University of Louisiana
6.2% Case Western Reserve University
5.9% Brandeis University
5.9% Tufts University
5.8% Pennsylvania State University-Main Campus
5.7% Carnegie Mellon University
5.6% Elon University
5.3% Rice University
5.3% Barnard College
5.2% Whitman College
5.1% Furman University
5.1% University of Notre Dame
5.0% Brown University
4.7% Dartmouth College
4.7% Trinity College
4.6% Boston University
4.6% Allegheny College
4.6% Oberlin College
4.5% St Olaf College
4.5% Willamette University
4.5% Pitzer College
4.3% Colorado College
4.3% Grove City College
4.2% Hamilton College
4.1% Reed College
4.1% Centre College
4.1% Wofford College
3.9% California Institute of Technology
3.9% Skidmore College
3.9% Lehigh University
3.8% Macalester College
3.7% Pomona College
3.5% Massachusetts Institute of Technology
3.3% Kenyon College
3.3% Northwestern University
3.2% Boston College
3.2% Bryn Mawr College
3.2% Trinity University
3.1% University of Chicago
3.0% Wesleyan University
3.0% Bucknell University
2.9% Amherst College
2.9% Wellesley College
2.7% Stanford University
2.6% Rhodes College
2.5% Swarthmore College
2.5% Sewanee-The University of the South
2.3% Carleton College
2.1% Middlebury College
2.1% Dickinson College
2.1% Colby College
2.0% DePauw University
2.0% Harvey Mudd College
2.0% Grinnell College
1.8% Davidson College
1.8% Denison University
1.6% Yale University
1.5% Yeshiva University
1.5% Muhlenberg College
1.5% Gettysburg College
1.5% Vassar College
1.1% Williams College
0.9% Lafayette College
0.9% Duke University
0.8% Harvard University
0.6% Washington and Lee University
0.6% Haverford College
0.3% Colgate University
0.2% Bowdoin College
0.0% Princeton University
0.0% Scripps College
0.0% United States Air Force Academy
0.0% United States Coast Guard Academy
0.0% United States Military Academy
0.0% United States Naval Academy</p>
<p>Note that those who have previous college credit are eligible for admission to the military service academies, but if they are admitted and matriculate, they start as plebes / frosh.</p>
<p>This is different from a place like Princeton, where “Any student who has graduated from secondary school and enrolled as a full-time degree candidate at another college or university is considered a transfer applicant and is not eligible for undergraduate admission” (although there may be different loopholes here).</p>
<p>Columbia also has a separate school designed for non traditional students whereas the others do not. For me, the biggest surprise on that list was how few transfers Cal Poly SLO takes every year.</p>
<p>Does Penn State UP not count student from the branch campuses (Altoona, Brandywine, etc) as transfers? The 5.8% figure seems extremely low for an expensive flagship.</p>
<p>“Why does Columbia (~27%) accept so many more transfer students than most of its Ivy peers, Stanford, MIT, Duke, Chicago, NU, etc. (<5%)?”</p>
<p>Although 27% is admittedly very high, many elite universities have transfer classes that make up over 5% of the student body:</p>
<p>University of California-Los Angeles 35%
University of California-Berkeley 34%
University of Wisconsin-Madison 26%
Georgia Institute of Technology 20%
University of Wisconsin-Madison 19%
New York University 18%
University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign 16%
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill 16%
Cooper Union 15%
University of Virginia 15%
Cornell University 14%
Johns Hopkins University 14%
College of William and Mary 13%
Emory University 12%
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor 12%
Vanderbilt University 11%
Claremont McKenna College 10%
University of Rochester 9%
Georgetown University 8%
Washington University St Louis 8%
University of Pennsylvania 7%
Carnegie Mellon University 6%
Tufts University 6%</p>
<p>I wonder if most of the transfer students at Cornell are in the NYS statutory colleges like Agriculture, Industrial Relations, and Human Ecology. They may have agreements with community colleges. Just speculating.</p>
<p>Probably because Columbia is more committed to the public good than it’s peers. Let’s not forget that it also takes a large number of Pell grant recipients of any private elite university. </p>
<p>Not sure about how much financial aid Columbia provides, but New-Yorkers might not have an elite but inexpensive alternative. An inexpensive alternative to Stanford, for example, is Berkeley which accepts a large amount of transfers; and although UNC accepts a low amount of transfers, it meets full need for its students (likely the reason for its low transfer acceptance rate) making it an inexpensive alternative to Duke; the closest thing Columbia has is NYU which leaves students with some of the highest debt in the nation. </p>
<p>As for USC’s high acceptance rate, it likely has to do with increasing it’s brand worldwide (it’s doing the same thing with international students. )</p>
<p>Schools that take more transfer students tend to have lower graduation rates for freshmen which makes sense since these schools have to replace freshmen drop-outs. But, the relationship between transfer student percent and graduation rate is not as strong as I thought it would have been (correlation = -.60). There is more to it than simply replacing freshmen drop-outs.</p>
<p>In the case of the California public universities, it is by design that the four year universities’ undergraduate populations are about 60% upper division students and 40% lower division students, with the “extra” upper division students coming in as junior-level transfers from two year community colleges.</p>
<p>Yes,the California model is expressly designed to allow large numbers of California residents to complete their first two years at a low-cost public community college and still graduate with a 4-year degree from a leading university. It also allows the UC system to serve a larger proportion of the state’s residents while limiting the number of underclass residence halls and introductory classes the UC campuses need to offer. It’s a quite sensible, cost-conscious model, in my opinion. It’s surprising more states don’t follow it.</p>
<p>I would interpret USC’s high percentage of transfers as in part just “piggybacking” on the UC model. A lot of very good students elect to do their first two years at California community colleges, knowing the UC option will be available to them so long as they keep their grades up. When it comes time for them to transfer, USC offers them a private alternative to the UCs. And it’s probably a gravy train for USC. In most disciplines upper-level classes are less likely to be oversubscribed, so padding them with a few transfers is likely to add little or no marginal cost while boosting revenue substantially. Not so if you increase the size of the freshman class which often requires adding sections of introductory classes, which in turn may require more instructors, more classrooms, more labs, etc.</p>
<p>Taking a large number of transfers is also, of course, a way to increase tuition revenue without diluting your SAT medians and US News rankings, as only freshman class stats are reported and used in the US News rankings. When you have a third of the class at USC and a quarter of the class at Columbia coming in under the radar as transfers, those reported SAT medians start to look pretty detached from reality. And in Columbia’s the percentage of under-the-radar admits is actually much higher, because they apparently don’t include college of General Studies students in their reported SAT medians, even if they’re admitted as freshmen.</p>
<p>Bclintonk: how many transfers would bring in tuition revenue to USC? A huge percent of students who went to the CC do not have the means of paying for a four year degree, hence why they opted for a CC. I’d expect they’d require as much, if not more financial aid than USC’s incoming freshmen with far fewer full pays in the mix (I understand that USC only has to provide financial aid for two years rather than four, but I still think that transfers are essentially a money losing proposition for most schools).</p>
<p>Not sure why a private school like USC would take so many transfers if it’s a money-losing proposition. That would just dilute what they can provide to the students admitted as freshmen.</p>
<p>I don’t know about USC’s admissions and FA policies, but many schools aren’t need-blind for transfers and/or don’t promise to meet full need for transfers. </p>
<p>Beyond that, I’d say a couple of things. First, according to USC’s website, only 50% of USC’s transfers come from California CCs. Another 15% come from other California private colleges, 11% from the UC or Cal State systems, 23% from out-of-state, and 1% from international colleges and universities. My guess is the non-CC transfers represent the full spectrum of SES, so that some are full-pays and most can pay part of the freight. And it’s not only the lowest-income students who transfer from California community colleges. CC students tend to skew lower income than those who start out at 4-year institutions, but some are doing it just to save money, not out of necessity; some attend CCs because they want to stay at home and commute for a couple of years (or because their parents require them to do so because they feel their children are not ready to be on their own); and others just need a couple of years to get their grades up to get into the caliber of 4-year colleges they want. So it’s a mix. And I wouldn’t be surprised if the CC students with the academic chops to transfer into USC skewed a little higher income than the general run of CC students, because those with higher CC GPAs are more likely to have started college better prepared as a result of having gone to better high schools and such.</p>
<p>For those transfers who have a lot of need, the state and federal governments pick up part of the tab in the form of Cal Grants (worth up to $9,084 annually at USC, according to the school’s website), federal Pell Grants (up to $5,550), federal student loans, and federal work study. Those state and federal sources can get you to roughly half of USC’s tuition. If USC does meet full need for transfers, the university would be responsible for the rest of COA (less EFC and ESC), but it probably doesn’t need to come up with very much real cash for that; essentially it’s just a bookkeeping entry, with the school nominally billing them for full tuition, then “paying itself” with a nominal amount entered as FA. Also note that USC doesn’t guarantee housing for transfers, so many probably just continue to commute from home, substantially reducing their COA. So if I’m right that the marginal cost to the university of an upperclass transfer student is minimal, then they might well be producing positive net tuition revenue even on transfer students who come in with EFCs of zero. But again, the average EFC for transfers is almost certainly well above zero. So I’d be very, very surprised if this is a money-losing proposition.</p>