Transfer Student Bias

Skorton’s hatching his egg — let’s try not to crush it.

Of the biases that crop up in an environment that values diversity, one that I would like to here address is the bias against transfer students. A significant portion of each class is comprised of transfers — around 20 percent — but these students are often viewed as second-class citizens of sorts, inferior in intelligence and here by way of a watered-down admissions process lacking real rigor.

Keep an ear out for it: the professor who thinks transfer students from that school have no business pursuing an honors thesis; the friend who confides that he applied to the transfer student’s original school as his safety — before throwing in that “everyone gets in there.” These judgments of fellow classmates and Cornellians are troubling, especially so given that the opinions are often based not on the transfer student in question and his or her merits and academic accomplishments, but on what is usually a sketchy (at best) knowledge of the transfer student’s university and its reputation.

Is this fair? Putting aside the issues of college status and of how many universities one can legitimately purport to “know” well enough to pass judgment on, why should someone be held “accountable” for transferring from a less “prestigious” private institution, one’s state university or a local community college? (This also applies to those who graduated from such colleges and universities — keep in mind that there are over 4,300 institutions of higher education in the United States alone.)

A common complaint one hears about transfer students is that they “had it easy” when applying to Cornell. A glance at our admissions statistics, however, shows that this is a more complicated question than one might initially suspect, and it reveals some unexpected results. In three of Cornell’s seven undergraduate colleges (including two in which biases against transfer students are reportedly the worst, Engineering and my own Arts and Sciences), the acceptance rates for transfer students are actually lower than the freshman acceptance rates — and significantly so for Engineering. Note: an important factor to be aware of when reading the data below is that some colleges, such as ILR, have in place strong programs designed to recruit transfer students from community colleges, which can lead to “inflated” transfer admissions rates.

Additionally, keep in mind that aspiring freshmen and transfer students are horses of a different color (yes, my undergraduate application essay was about The Wizard of Oz), and are thus difficult to compare. While high school seniors applying to Cornell have a high school GPA (not including senior year grades) plus an SAT or ACT score, transfer students have substantial college coursework under their belts, accompanied by a partial college GPA and a complete high school record. In many regards, transfer students are likely more competitive as applicants — but this could only be tested if transfers and prospective freshmen were included in the same applicant pool, which they are not.

A parting point: very few students at Cornell were accepted with no helping hand in admissions. If transfer students have a “leg up” (and they most certainly do not if they are applying to Engineering), so do a lot of other students. In the search for the student who applied with no such “leg up,” we would need someone who is: 1) not an early decision admit, 2) non-legacy, 3) non-minority, 4) not a recruited athlete, 5) not a transfer student (but only in some cases, as noted above), 6) not a development admit, 7) not a faculty/staff brat, and 8) not from a state that Cornell absolutely needs to enroll a student from so we can say we have freshmen from all 50 states. Oh, and likely within the next decade, 9) not a guy. (In his book The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges — and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates, Pulitzer-prize winning author Daniel Golden estimates this number to be a mere 25 percent of the average class size.)

There is no need to treat others in a condescending manner for any reason, but especially not for admissions reasons. The admissions office does its job well — let’s trust them and respect each other, while leaving our snobbishness at the door.

Alex Wolf ’06 can be contacted at alexander.michael.wolf@gmail.com. Alumni Viewpoint appears periodically.