We just added the recently released Fall 2010 transfer admissions numbers for some of the top schools in the US (the “2012″ Top 50 National Universities according to US News).
Check it out by clicking here, or by hovering over the “Stats” tab at the top of the page and clicking on the first option in the dropdown menu.
Additionally – because we love you, obviously – we also put together a table comparing the transfer admissions rates in 2010 and 2009 at the same schools. Click here to check it out, or hover over the “Stats” menu and click on the second dropdown. It’s one thing to see what a college’s transfer admission rate was in a given year, but it’s even more helpful – we hope – to see how consistent (or not) the admissions rates are over a period of time.
Generally speaking, it looks like the trend of shrinking admissions rates continues this year.
20 of the 50 schools had higher transfer admissions rates than freshman admissions rates, while 29 of the 50 had lower transfer admissions rates versus freshman admissions (Princeton, which doesn’t take any transfers, is the remaining school).
21 of the 50 colleges had their transfer admissions rates increase versus last year, while more schools (27 of the 50) became more selective. Harvard began admitting transfers again as of Fall 2010, so their rate went from 0% in 2009 to 2% this year. We could not get previous year data for George Washington University, which was not in the Top 50 last year, so we couldn’t track how their transfer admission rate changed.
Looking at the largest moves, Lehigh University’s transfer admissions rate shrank from 70% last year to 36% this year, while UC Davis’s increased to 66% from 37%.
Obviously the transfer admissions rates are a function of a large number of factors (the quality of the applicant pool, the number of students that choose to apply, the spaces available given the admitting colleges’ own dropout/transfer out rates, etc.). So, just use the stats as a metric to get a roundabout sense of how hard it may be to transfer to a particular school, knowing that the numbers can change fairly significantly, but not too dramatically in any given year. Either way, if you’re targeting a school and have good reason to transfer to it (such as any of the many successful real stories mentioned in the book), the stats shouldn’t affect your approach too much either way.
Question of the Day: Do you see any interesting patterns in the stats? Surprised that a particular school has a particular transfer admissions rate? Intrigued that a certain college’s transfer admissions rate changed so much? Let us know in the comments! We plan on following up with some of the schools to better understand their particular policies toward transfer admissions.
(Photo: kkoshy)
Hey guys, I am a CC student interested in Georgetown- and am appalled at their increase in transfer rate. The university seems to be really ambiguous with their transfer policies, any knowledge on this?
Hey Rtkpandita, thanks for the comment! As awdfg pointed out above, Georgetown is one of the schools that releases transfer admissions data ahead of the College Board (http://uadmissions.georgetown.edu/transfer/studentprofile/), so we know that the transfer admission rate for Fall 2011 went back down to 10%.
On that page they also note that, as is the case for most colleges, “the number of students accepted through [the] transfer process varies each year depending on space.” It looks like they had a bit fewer applications for Fall 2010, as well as some more space, hence the unusually high acceptance rate.
As a side note, the fact that transfer acceptance rates often fluctuate even more than freshman rates is one of the reasons we strongly recommend applying to multiple schools in the book (even if you’re pining for a particular school).
The most recent transfer rate at Georgetown is 10%, not 23%. Why did you guys do 2010? Aren’t most 2011 numbers available?
That’s interesting. May we ask where 10% comes from? According to the College Board website, there were 1616 transfer applicants and 364 accepted were accepted. Doing the calculations, 361/1616, the transfer admission rate is about 23%.
As of now, the most complete admissions information is available for 2010. By Fall 2010, more complete admissions information for 2011 will be available. If you have found a website that lists all the admissions rates for 2011, it would be awesome if you shared it here.
Here’s the Georgetown Profile on the College Board site:
http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com/search/CollegeDetail.jsp?collegeId=3736&profileId=1
See the 2011 section in the table:
http://uadmissions.georgetown.edu/transfer/studentprofile/
I think the issue is that College Board is a year behind. Their numbers don’t match the most current data on Notre Dame or Vanderbilt’s websites either.
I think I can clear things up a bit. As you point out, Georgetown and several other schools choose to release early numbers on their own, either on their own websites, through press releases, or in some cases when they talk to their own campus newspapers.
A lot of schools, though, don’t release their transfer admissions statistics until up to a year later. We like to present a complete table, so we wait till everyone has their data in to the College Board.
Hope that clears everything up. Thanks!
Duke’s admission rate fluctuates a lot, is there a pattern to that? Or is it going to keep going down?
Good question! No idea, but we’ll try and look into their particular policy (some schools are actively trying to enroll more transfer students).
I am interested in transferring to Carnegie Mellon, and during my freshman application last year, I was put on the priority waitlist, and then told that no one was admitted off the waitlists due to overenrollment. How could they still find the room to accept transfer students?
Even if they have overenrollment in freshmen, colleges still usually reserve space for transfer students (because they add diversity, etc.).
Do you know what the rates were like for liberal arts schools? For example Pomona, Swarthmore or Wesleyan? All three of these schools ranked in the top 15 for US News: National Liberal Arts College Rankings.
We’re working on putting up a page of stats for those schools soon. I’ll personally let you know when we get that done (hopefully pretty soon!).