GPA for Admission to GS

Leonhard
Tue, 13 Dec 2016 17:22:44 +0000

GS admission is different than “traditional” college admission. First, its applicants tend to have an untraditional path, and more life experience. Second, in most cases they are transferring from a two or four year school, freshman is very rare. These make the overall GPA, kind of doesn’t matter.

I was accepted in Spring 2017 term, and I believe there is no cut-off GPA for GS admission. This being said, GS is an official undergraduate school at Columbia, and you need to convince admissions that you can compete and succeed at an Ivy school. When You saw some people with 3.4 or 3.5 GPA getting accepted, it was overall GPA and to be honest, it is very misleading. “All the accepted students have 4.0 GPA, or write exceptional essays” is more the reality: If s/he had a “bad” academic history for college and took a break, s/he need to have stellar gpa AFTER enrolling at another school, to be considered competitive in GS admission.

High school GPA almost doesn’t matter in transfer admission. Your college GPA isn’t bad at all, considering what’ve happened unfortunately. But I would recommend you go back to college, work hard and achieve 3.9+ GPA. If your current work experience is outstanding, you can go ahead and apply.