What do top colleges have against transfer students?

@julliet I think the difficulty from both your and @Vincent1997 points comes from the over-generalizations that are made when discussing community college. While it’s easy to discuss HYPSM, because those are five universities with more similarities than differences, there are over 1,000 community colleges.

In my experience, I took 88 credits at CC. Some of those classes annoyed me by how easy they were (i.e. paying for credits), and some really challenged me, and pushed me, into becoming a student who can (and has) done well at a HYPSM. No two CCs, and no two classes are going to be exactly the same, and there is no way for every adcom to know every CC.

I think when it comes down to it the adcom at those higher level universities have to take the entire application into account (beyond simply the CC transcript) and ask themselves whether the person can translate to a university atmosphere. While I’m sure they don’t bat 1000 with their admissions, they’re probably pretty close.