Random and someone may have already said this, but there are several top schools that have about the same or higher acceptance rates for transfer. I mean, maybe not at HYPMS, but there are quite a few T20s and T LACs with “OK” transfer acceptance rates.
@Ashtash it seems that usc might be one of them.
I know of several schools that actually have higher transfer rates than admission rates. USC has about a 16% freshman acceptance rate and a 33% transfer rate. For a lot of schools, especially in the UC system, you actually have a better shot at getting accepted if you go to community college in that state first and then apply for a transfer. Not only that, but you get to save money in the process.
@Vincent1997 USC does seem to be one of them. I know of 2 students that received the transfer option they provide. I know they also admit quite a few people coming from California community colleges. I personally don’t know much about USC and the UC schools, I know USC and many UC schools attract high-achieving student. However, the 2 students I know that received the transfer option really did not have great grades, scores, or anything stellar at all. Not quite sure what’s up with USC. Perhaps they were simply outliers.
For Fall 2017, the USC transfer admit rate was 24% and the average transfer GPA was 3.7. Depending on costs and financial aid, not all will attend. Some, if admitted to UCLA or UC Berkeley, may choose to go there.
After completing freshman year at a UC, S is transferring to USC this Fall 2018. He had a 3.95 UC quarter system GPA to get admitted to USC. A couple of his UC freshman classmates also had similar GPA’s and were admitted to as USC transfers for Fall 2018. For financial reasons, they will defer and enroll in Spring 2019 and take classes at a CC during the Fall of 2018.
S, who had great high school stats, was offered the USC transfer plan coming out of high school. Do well and admission is almost guaranteed. I heard through a friend, Cornel offers a similar transfer plan and the friend’s son was accepted to Cornel after a year at Tulane.
https://admission.usc.edu/apply/our-admission-process/#/transfer-student-profile
sorry, above #24, I meant Cornell University, not Cornel.
Grade inflation is pretty common in elite universities, too. I’ve seen curves in classes where 80% of students got an A or a B (and about 35% got an A). Harvard openly admits the most common grade given out is an A.
The problem (IMO) is less about the grade inflation and more about student preparation. Community colleges take all kinds of students, from the high achiever who doesn’t know about financial aid (or still can’t afford a top school with it) to students who struggled in high school to retirees taking a class or two to learn a skill or pursue a hobby. The class levels often have to be pitched right in the middle or lower, and even smart high-achieving students who attended community colleges for the first two years may struggle in the the competitive elite university classes and atmosphere. Of course, they may thrive - it’s kind of difficult to tell.
I would guess that the majority of admitted Princeton transfers are athletes. Regular students should not keep their hopes too high.
@Tanbiko Eight were military veterans, and most came from community college.
I transferred to Stanford, and in my class only two of the 27 accepted transfers were recruited athletes. It’s hard to say exactly what it is they’re looking for, and you’re not wrong that people shouldn’t have high hopes to transfer to a Princeton or Stanford, but it’s not just athletes.
@julliet I think the difficulty from both your and @Vincent1997 points comes from the over-generalizations that are made when discussing community college. While it’s easy to discuss HYPSM, because those are five universities with more similarities than differences, there are over 1,000 community colleges.
In my experience, I took 88 credits at CC. Some of those classes annoyed me by how easy they were (i.e. paying for credits), and some really challenged me, and pushed me, into becoming a student who can (and has) done well at a HYPSM. No two CCs, and no two classes are going to be exactly the same, and there is no way for every adcom to know every CC.
I think when it comes down to it the adcom at those higher level universities have to take the entire application into account (beyond simply the CC transcript) and ask themselves whether the person can translate to a university atmosphere. While I’m sure they don’t bat 1000 with their admissions, they’re probably pretty close.
Both Stanford’s and Princeton’s public statements about transfer students and admissions suggest that they are mainly looking for (a very few) non-traditional students.
This may be different from what other super-selective universities are looking for in transfer students.
All top schools have extremely high retention rates So transfers would be quite limited at a top school if transfers are only used to replace un-retained students.
But plenty of top schools (other than the HYPS level) take lots of transfers and have those spots baked into their model. At places like UCB, UCLA, USC, UVA, Gtown, BU, ND, Vandy, Cornell, the class size grows larger as the years go by for a variety of reasons.
On-campus housing limits, load balancing, articulation agreements with CCs. Can be good business for the schools, since transfer students can be managed in a way that produces a lot of additional full payors. Also, the transfer students stay “off-the-books” for selectivity and grad rate ranking metrics.
Actually, for public universities, transfer students commonly come from lower SES backgrounds, because many of them had to start at community college to save money, or are non-traditional students who do not have any significant parental money for college (yes, there are veterans with GI Bill money, but there are many non-veterans as well among transfer students). So their financial aid need per year may be greater than those who entered as frosh. However, even if they get more financial aid per year, they will be there fewer years.
@Corbett, yep, tutorials take manpower. That’s why almost every other uni in England besides Oxbridge (and a handful of others) don’t offer many weekly tutorials of 1-2 students any more.
BTW, Sarah Lawrence, NCF, William Jewell’s Oxbridge Honors program, and Ohio U’s Honors Tutorial College also offer tutorials.
So schools not fighting for the top of the rankings may be more incented to offer special tutorial-style classes (as a draw to bright kids).
@northwesty, yep. If I remember correctly, USC takes in 3K traditional freshmen each fall and graduates 5K undergrads each year.
There are lists comparing freshman admission rates to transfer admission rates you can google. Pretty interesting and definitely varies by school. Some transfer rates are <1%!!! Some are significantly higher than the freshman rate. Some are on par.
Transfers may be a way to get more diverse students that perhaps have lower HS SAT/GPAs but have proven themselves in college. Their stats don’t get included in the Common Data Set.
@cu1123 - When you are paying $60,000 or more a year, finding out that your child cannot take a class because enrollment is artificially capped at 19 is construed by many as a “bad thing”.
I think the headline here is VERY misleading. While there are some schools that are clearly not very open to transfers, most have transfer acceptance rates that reflect their freshman retention rates—there is simply no room for additional students if there are not a lot of first-years transferring or dropping out. Many have transfer acceptance rates that are about the same as that for first-years (Columbia, Penn, Georgetown, for instance). And there are some notable exceptions—specifically Vandy (11% vs. 30%), NU (9% vs. 16%), USC (16% vs. 24%)—where transfer acceptance rates are actually substantially higher than acceptance rates for freshmen.
If the authors of the rankings reports knew how it would affect thousands of students over the years would they still have written the initial reports? The best thing that could happen would be for people to ignore this “service” The gaming of the system totally undermines what is good for students. Actually, the ways in which schools enroll and count things is shameful. But people are like lemmings and all use the same tools to figure out where to apply instead of doing the research themselves. Maybe someone intelligent will come out with a web site which shows “the rankings” and shows how each school manipulates their data so that a light is shown on these practices.