Transfer Student Acceptance Rates At Ivy League Colleges


While much attention is paid to the notoriously low acceptance rates at the universities in the Ivy League – indeed, those high rejection rates are often used as a misguided proxy for institutional excellence – less scrutiny has been given to the likelihood of a student being able to transfer into one of the eight schools.

One reason that transfer rates at the Ivies is seldom a topic of investigation might be because they happen so rarely – why bother examining an event that’s highly unlikely to occur. But as discussions continue about how elite institutions can increase access for higher education’s historically underserved students, an inspection of how they treat applications from students wanting to transfer is in order.

If elite colleges like those in the Ivy League were to welcome – and accept – more applications from students currently attending community college or less wealthy institutions, they might be able to improve the socioeconomic mix and diversity of their student bodies.

“Community college transfer students bring a really important perspective to campus,” according to Tania LaViolet, PhD, director of the College Excellence Program (CEP) at the Aspen Institute. “Not only are they more racially and socioeconomically diverse, but they also have more diverse backgrounds in terms of age and life experience.”

To examine the fate of transfer applicants to the Ivy League colleges, I used the most recent (2021-22) Common Data Set, posted at the website of each school. The Common Data Set is a standard form completed by institutions to report on a wide range of indicators such as applications, admissions, transfers, enrollment, retention, financial aid, and graduation.

The data include applications and acceptances for first-time, first-year undergraduates as well was for transfer students for Fall, 2021 admissions. For readers who want to dig into these data a bit more, I’ve included a link to each institution’s completed 2021-22 Common Data Set.

At five of the Ivies, the rate of accepting transfer students seeking admission was lower – sometimes much lower – than the acceptance rate for first-time freshmen applicants.

  • The lowest acceptance rates of transfer students were at Harvard University and Yale University, both which accepted only .8% of them. Harvard’s acceptance rate of freshmen applicants was 4% in Fall, 2021, and Yales’s was 5.3%.
  • Princeton University accepted 4.4% of its freshmen applicants, versus 1.3% of transfer students seeking admission.
  • Brown University accepted 5.5% of 46,568 first-time, first-year applicants, a bit higher than the 4.3% of 2,746 transfer applicants.
  • At the University of Pennsylvania, 5.9% of freshmen applicants were accepted for admission, compared to 4.6% of transfer applicants.

The three exceptions to this pattern were Dartmouth, Cornell and Columbia.

  • Dartmouth College accepted 6.2% of freshmen applicants, and 9.9% of transfer applicants.
  • At Cornell University, 8.7% of 67,300 freshmen applicants were accepted, significantly less than the 15.7% acceptance rate for its 5,908 transfer applicants.
  • Columbia University now reports two data sets – one for Columbia College and Columbia Engineering, to which most undergraduates apply, and one for Columbia General Studies, a unique unit among Ivy League schools dedicated to serving nontraditional students, such as those who’ve interrupted their studies for some reason or are transferring from community college. At Columbia College/Engineering, 3.9% of freshmen applicants were accepted, compared to 14.7% of transfer applicants. The General Studies unit accepted 27,8% of first-year applicants, less than half of its 57.9% acceptance rate for transfer applicants.

Your chances of being admitted as a freshmen to any Ivy League college are less than 10%, but the road for transfer applicants is even less traveled – excluding the special program at Columbia, the median rate of acceptance for transfers is less than 5%. The phrase “slim to none” comes to mind.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Plenty of top-flight colleges – both public and private – accept a significantly higher percentage of transfer applicants than first-timers. The University of Virginia is an example; so are Vanderbilt University, Emory University, and the University of Florida. And those transfer student do well; they persist and they graduate at levels comparable to non-transfers.

If Ivy League schools are serious about enhancing the diversity of their student bodies, a good place for them to start is to simply admit more transfer students. They’ll come, and they’ll succeed.



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