Can I transfer from Emory Oxford to Main Campus?

bernie12
Tue, 03 Jun 2014 16:24:37 +0000

I don’t know where such misconceptions about Oxford come from. And the fact that parents buy into it (while also naively buying into the glamor of the overly hyped “top private research universities”). If the OP goes to the state school first using that sort of reasoning, then they don’t actually value the supposed advantages of a private school education (as they probably shouldn’t unless it’s an LAC, Caltech, Princeton, or something like that) or a liberal arts setting and honestly should not bother transferring into Emory because they should end up liking the state school a lot. If you feel that way about Oxford, I would really just save the money, go to the state school and graduate from it. Because the feelings about Oxford should be translated into the same feelings about most top private schools which are clearly overly expensive and still function like normal state research universities, but perhaps with smaller classes and sometimes more rigorous courses (again, when compared to more "standard state schools).

You will run into plenty of bad instructors, courses below the college level, etc, but at least you aren’t sitting in a large auditorium when you receive that level of instruction right? At least Oxford cannot claim those things. The giant state schools and overly priced medium sized private research U’s can on the other hand. Plus the curriculum at Oxford is far more innovative and rich than most places.Oh…wait, that doesn’t count, let’s let rankings, our perceptions of prestige, and incoming SAT’s dictate how we view the nature and quality of education a student will receive, in which case UCLA must suck in comparison to similarly ranked schools right and one certainly should not attend it if they are OOS because it’s super expensive. The logic behind how people evaluate educational quality and how much a school is worth from most people just baffles me. It’s like no one chooses to investigate further or look into things a bit deeper than ideas of prestige and selectivity. It is as if no one cares about the fact that you will and should actually be LEARNING at these places and the learning environments at many places varies dramatically even among schools with similar stats. Nope we choose to believe, all schools with similar student bodies are equal.

Therefore Vanderbilt, Duke, Penn= Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Chicago and MIT with academics right? Can the student bodies perform similar theoretically, maybe? But do the schools push their students to the same levels academically taking into account the incoming talent levels, definitely not (sometimes a simple look at the design of the curriculum and course offerings in a department of interest will reveal such differences quickly. Often course offerings and descriptions reflect what students demand and what instructors believe they can demand from their students. Instructors at some schools, on the whole, choose to demand a lot more or are willing to offer courses on more complex topics or teach the courses at a much higher level than other schools with similar student bodies. Institutional culture and student attitude toward academic rigor and intellectual curiousity rules the day)! Some schools don’t want very intense academic environments and some do. Some student bodies appreciate that and some don’t want it. They all have developed different intensity levels despite having student bodies who test almost identically. It’s like how Oxford is generally more intense than main, especially when it comes to liberal arts oriented courses, yet Oxford has a “worse” student body. Georgia Tech used to have a worse student body than Emory and yet we know it was and still is overall harder much like Harvard vs. MIT. UGA had about the same student body as Oxford and yet we know Oxford is a bit more academically intense and perhaps academically enriched…I mean come on, get with it. These things are no-brainers. I know it’s hard for many high schoolers to wrap their brains around this idea (though many do, like many incoming pre-profs may choose between top 20s based on how much grade inflation or course rigor is at each school, essentially choosing the easiest one when the schools are comparable in prestige), but parents, current college students, and alums should know better and think a little deeper