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<p>As a former transfer student myself, I have been thinking about transfer admissions for a long while. My conclusion: The backdoors are very intentional. Vanderbilt has developed a reputation for being a transfer-friendly school, which people sometimes interpret as being a backdoor. Vanderbilt, like Brown, reserves the right to be need-aware for transfer students. Since transfer students often stay for three years or less, you can see why admitting more freshmen instead draws in more revenue. On the other hand, transfer students with high EFCs are still chosen over freshmen with low EFCs because they can pay the bill. Many schools ignore their need-blind admission policy when dealing with transfers. While freshmen admissions are often need-blind, no one said anything about comparing freshmen to transfers.</p>
<p>In other words, competitive transfers are wild cards. In addition to their main role of filling designated quotas for funding, they can be used to add any type of diversity (international, racial, major, geographical) and increase the school’s revenue, all while making the school appear a little bit more competitive than natural. Transfer grades are often omitted from the average admitted GPA, and their SAT scores are often left out as well. For every amazing transfer student, a school can cut out a less appealing freshman, whether they add too little diversity to the campus, their grades were below average, or most important of all, their family is in a low income bracket.</p>
<p>I do note the difference is somewhat negligible. In Northwestern’s case, swapping 80 freshmen for transfers is not going to change the statistics by very much when you have 2000 freshmen enrolling every year anyway. Even Vanderbilt would remain more or less the same by cutting down on transfer admissions. On the other hand, schools showing extreme deficiency in a particular category (for example, Notre Dame’s Asian-American population) can suck up Asian transfers to play the statistics game. </p>
<p>I believe the negative effects of enrolling more transfers has more to do with prestige, due to applicants trying to game the system. Rising freshmen who did poor in high school are always looking for a second chance, as seen a lot on this very forum, myself included. The most competitive colleges want to give the impression their doors are sealed after freshman admission, or otherwise everyone and their siblings would be applying to transfer into a top-tier university. Yet they leave the door just the least bit open so they can suck up transfer application fees and admit wealthy, well-connected students. Of course, they have to admit transfer students with high grades as well, or otherwise people would notice the low average college GPAs of transfers. The low transfer acceptance rates of the top 13 are very much intended to dissuade freshmen in lower-ranked colleges from submitting the Transfer Common Application to any top 13 school. And yet so many people try to transfer anyway. Unless you can bring money, diversity, near-perfect grades, or any combination of the three (most of all MONEY), I would just avoid applying in the first place.</p>
<p>Colleges like Vanderbilt, Emory, Rice, and Notre Dame are just a little lower ranked than their top 15 counterparts; thus, they can get away with admitting more transfer students, and reap the slight benefits they come with. Even so, no self-respecting top-tier school wants to be known as the transfer backdoor to prestige. I figure in the face of so many super-competitive freshman applicants, even Vanderbilt will have to start slashing their transfer acceptance rates to match their first-year percentages.</p>
<p>Ugh, just daydreamed in my own thread.</p>