Vanderbilt’s freshmen admissions is among the most competitive in the country at 10.7%. However, the transfer acceptance rate is closer to 30%, which is pretty high for an elite school. Vanderbilt seems to have a high freshmen class retention, so why does Vanderbilt have such a high acceptance rate?
1 Like
@Dontskipthemoose
Several schools artificially cut their freshman class to lower their admit rates because the rankings only use the first time college(freshman) admit rate.I know Vandy and USC utilize this tactic; their gaming the system like several other elites. They prefer to instead use transfers to fill their class and recuperate some tuition funds. Vandy’s admit rate would be closer to 15-17% and USC’s would be 23-30%. USC has a freshman class of around 3000, but they graduate over 5000 students every year so they heavily rely on transfers.
@VANDEMORY1342 Is it a gaming the system or a good strategy to conserve resources and find gems? May be the Ingram Commons is at its full capacity, but the sophomore and the upper classes may have more spaces (both living and class spaces). Or maybe the school has found in the past, the transfer students are excellent and are the ones really want to be attend Vandy and want a second chance? Transfer students can be from peer schools. My D’s friend’s sister was a Vandy transfer from Cornell.
@amNotarobot How do you find gems with over a 30% transfer acceptance rate? Sure, it would be nice to think Vandy has noble recherche admissions but it’s more venal than anything. They all do it to some extent so it doesn’t really matter.
Edit: The schools the transfers come from is besides the point, it’s the amount.
Vandy does grow its class, on a net basis, by about 100-120 students over the four years. Most of its peer schools (which also have very low freshman attrition) do that too in comparable percentages (ND, Emory, Gtown, Rice). For all those schools, the transfer admit rate is higher than the frosh admit rate.
Lots of reasons for doing that. For example, taking in upper class transfers keeps the school running at capacity and full revenue even though substantial numbers of kids will be absent for a full semester for study abroad. Limited on campus freshman housing can also be another explanation.
Shrinking the size of the original freshman class can also have the effect of making the published admissions statistics more selective. And also helps boost the frosh retention rate (which is another important rankings metric). Transfers fit into that plan. Some schools now do the same thing (Northeastern) by accepting kids only for the frosh spring semester or by having them do a frosh fall semester abroad.
Or look at ND’s Gateway program. They send about 70 kids across the street to Holy Cross College, who then get admitted as ND sophs if they perform OK as HCC frosh. For rankings purposes, those kids count as denies even though most of them wind up eventually as ND students/grads.
USC is the king of transfers – they add about 2,000 students to the class over the four years. Part of that is probably rankings management related. But more likely, it reflects the market dynamics in California. Lots of CA kids go to a CC for a year or two and then transfer to a UC. So USC’s transfer practices largely mirror how their peers (UCB, UCLA) operate.