<p>I keep seeing posts around here in which people say that top schools such as those in the Ivy League prefer to accept students that faced many hardships yet still manage to do good in school. </p>
<p>For example they would rather accept someone from "the hood" in southeast Washington D.C. who managed to get a 3.9 GPA with a 2300 SAT score instead of someone from an upper class family who went to an expensive private school with a 4.0 GPA and a 2300 SAT score. (is this true?)</p>
<p>If that's the case then why do they have low community college student transfers? I know they have a few spots every year, with Harvard sometimes having none, but it seems that those accepted as transfers usually come from other top schools. </p>
<p>Many may say that its because community college students are not competitive, that they were all slackers in high school, that their GPAs were low, that only weed-head slackers attend community college but that's not true. There are many community college students who did great in high school but chose to attend community college for different reasons, sometimes because due to some family or economic problem it was the better choice. Yet I've never heard of a community college student being accepted into Harvard (although I've heard of some very distinguished community college students apply yet none seem to be accepted), I've heard of only one being accepted into Yale, very few to other schools. Cornell seems to be the most friendly towards community colleges from the Ivy League schools and Georgetown from the top 20 national universities. </p>
<p>Do these schools prefer to accept someone who is slightly less "competitive" but who attended a top 4-year university instead of someone who attended a community college? Do the admissions officers hold the typical stereotypes of community college?</p>
<p>Your post doesn’t really take into account the fact that many of those transfers from top schools may have come from a modest/impoverished background. You said it yourself, top schools prefer to accept students that have faced hardship; it follows that a good chunk of students at those top schools, including ones considering transferring, came from humble beginnings. At that point, you have to consider the hypothetical scenario of two transfer applications identical in every respect except for the colleges of the applicants. Would Harvard rather accept the student from a peer institution or take a gamble on the CC student? With the former, Harvard can be sure that the student excelled in a rigorous academic setting and would most likely be able to “keep up”, so to speak. That’s not to say that the CC student couldn’t, but it’s a game of odds, and admissions officers do have to accept the candidates that look most promising.</p>
<p>Most “top schools” do have a student population that is much heavily biased toward those from wealthy backgrounds than the student population at most community colleges.</p>
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<p>Apparently, Stanford is fine with students transferring from community colleges.</p>
<p>I don’t think 2 years at a CC really prepares you for Jr level standing at Harvard. I do not think top colleges view CC students the way that you seem to think people do. They are educational professionals and they know the landscape. I think it comes down to the right preparation to take the Harvard upper division courses. For instance, I was looking up Brown the other day. They don’t take AP Chem as chem credits or even give advanced standing. It is just considered a prerequisite for the intro level chem there. So a CC first chem class is going to be like that too. Not equal to the first level at an ivy, and so on with each following level. </p>
<p>As far as freshman admission are concerned, with your first example, where the students have what would be considered identical statistics (but class schedule and EC’s will mean never 2 identical right) then will likely be more interested in the URM, first in family to go to college, hardship person. Simply because they already have something like 100 or even 1,000 of the well to do student for each one from the ‘hood’. See? For transfers, I think this comes a bit less into play and what comes in a bit more is why they need to study at that particular uni and what kind of college preparation they will have had for it.</p>
<p>There are always exceptions where a CC student had an outstanding HS record and even better CC record, honor society, tons of leadership at the CC, compelling extracurricular, maybe a Jack Kent Cooke scholar and I have seen reports of such students accepted to Penn and some similar cases, one in particular, of a ex-felon going to URI and then Brown then Yale law. These are going to be pretty exceptional people and even they are not getting into Harvard.</p>
<p>How, in your example, is the person from the top 4 year less competitive than the CC student? We know they had an outstanding HS record, have taken classes at a higher level and as I said, they are usually transferring because the Harvard history department is more specialized in the area they are interested than Brown, for example.</p>
<p>Probably true, although Columbia (General Studies) and Cornell are probably more transfer friendly and more friendly to CC transfer students than the rest of their sports league (Princeton accepts no transfers at all).</p>