chances of transferring?

Colene
Sat, 07 Jan 2012 17:26:20 +0000

"Who cares how selective Cornell is? "
A lot of people including all the other ivies. It matters because Cornell is an ivy league and it is compared to the other ivies. Because of the contract colleges’ policies, Cornell is sometimes snubbed upon as the “easiest ivy”. The only reason that other top schools that are less selective don’t have as much of a problem (cough JHU) with this issue is because they’re not part of the ivy league, which has connotations of “academic excellence, selectivity in admissions, and social elitism” (wikipedia). Cornell is rather iffy on the 2nd aspect in comparison to the other ivies especially the last 2-3 years. This would not be a problem if Cornell wasn’t an ivy. Selectivity matters for USWNR rankings too, which Cornell has been slipping in (It was 12th 2 years ago). It doesn’t matter how good Cornell academics is when that part of the school doesn’t cut the curve. Whether you like it or not, many students make choices based on USNWR rankings and lowering USNWR rankings lowers the quality and quantity of the applicants and students. Sorry but I don’t like my school getting dragged down by these policies perpetuated by that part of the school! If you think about it, changing these policies would also make the contract colleges more reputable than they are now.

"What matters is that they admit passionate students from diverse backgrounds. Each student either from a community college or top 20 university has something important to add to the Cornell community. "

I don’t see how a student from a community college would add more to Cornell than a qualified freshman or a qualified transfer from better universities.

Also, many, many people have that passion. What sets the bar is academic qualification. This is a top school, after all.

“The admissions committee sees the importance of transfer candidate, you guys should too. I think they are fine.”
I’m fine with having a reasonable number of qualified transfers entering Cornell. I’m not fine with the high number of guaranteed transfers offered and GTs from community colleges. I would be fine with GT if they didn’t offer SO MANY students GT and if they were given with discretion.

@Lake, 1500 is a very big number considering all of the guaranteed transfers are offered from the contract colleges. According to http://dpb.cornell.edu/documents/1000149.pdf#zoom=100. the accepted number of freshmen into contract colleges is about 1700 and 1100 entered. The number of people that were offered guaranteed transfers is bigger than the entering class and almost as big as the number of students admitted. This leads to problems like, oh idk, having about 40% of ILR being extrernal transfers.

^If you think about it, that means that significantly more than 50% of ILR outside of the freshmen class (which has no transfers) are transfers. I kind of have a problem with that.

by the way, I think we’ve gone quite off topic. I didn’t start this though.