A classmate of mine got into Columbia from a CC last year.
If you go with an associates degree: Focus on an associates degree for students who wants to transfer into a university program.
@Shagunbali Go Beavers! I’m in my second semester, haha.
I think it depends on whether the student had good grades in high school and good test scores to begin with, and also the age of the student. There are a lot of students who already had good high school grades, but for whatever reason chose a CC. Those students tend to get into really great schools.
On the other hand, a lot of students like myself (terrible high school grades; 4.0 college GPA, honors program, etc.) got rejected almost universally across the elite schools. I was rejected by Cornell and Carnegie Mellon, among many other private top 20 schools (I had actually taken 9 credits AT CMU with a 4.0 and had recs from their own professors!). I got into every state flagship school I applied to (even the “better” ones). I think state schools are either more lenient on high school stats, or they are more focused on college performance. I not only got into every state school I applied to, several out-of-state schools gave me extremely generous financial aid packages/waived OOS tuition for me (though none gave me as much as Mizzou’s Honors College, so that’s where I’m going this fall).
Another factor is age/the place you are at in life. While schools are now making a very public effort to recruit veterans and URMs, I do NOT think the same effort or mentality is extended to students who are older and without those two particular hooks. I politely asked for feedback from one of the schools I’d been rejected from and was told they couldn’t see how I would fit in with the “campus community.” I already have a career in mechanical design engineering (even though I obviously am not a licensed engineer), I would have to work during school, I come from an extremely uneducated & lower-class background (my mom is a welfare recipient/drug addict and my dad sews shoes for a living), etc. It just didn’t jive with the elite schools, I guess.
@grahamcracker123 apply to Penn and their LPS program – bet you’ll get in
I know one person at my cc in Georgia who got into Stanford. Heard about it during an honors society meeting.