Think applying out of high school to Ivy League schools was tough? Well, it’s even tougher for transfer students. Just how tough, you ask? If less than 1% of transfer applicants in a given year get in, would you say that’s pretty tough? That was the transfer admission rate at Harvard College and at Yale University for transfer applicants applying for fall 2021 admission. And it’s not like that was Harvard’s lowest ever transfer admission rate. After all, we haven’t forgotten all those years ago when Harvard admitted zero transfer students. We expressed at the time that it wasn’t right that Harvard accepted the application dollars of so many transfer applicants that year only to choose to admit not a single student. But it’s not like Harvard is alone among the Ivy League schools in admitting an infinitesimal percentage of transfer applicants. Let’s have a look around the Ivies at the transfer acceptance rates and compare these figures with the acceptance rates out of high school.

Harvard and Yale Boast Lowest Transfer Admission Rate for Fall 2021

According to the 2021-2022 Common Data Set, after Harvard and Yale’s 0.8% transfer admission rate for fall 2021 admission, Princeton University followed with a 1.3% transfer admission rate that year. Next came Brown University with a 4.3% transfer admission rate, followed by the University of Pennsylvania (4.6%), Dartmouth College (9.9%), and Cornell University (15.7%). Columbia University reports their transfer admissions statistics a bit differently than their Ivy League peer institutions. Columbia admitted 14.7% of transfer applicants to both Columbia College and the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, while its School of General Studies admitted 57.9% of transfer applicants. For this same admissions cycle, the overall admission rates for first-year applicants stood at 4% for Harvard, 5.3% for Yale, 4.4% for Princeton, 5.5% for Brown, 5.9% for UPenn, 6.2% for Dartmouth, 8.7% for Cornell, and 3.9% for Columbia (College College and SEAS) and 27.8% at SGS.

Transfer Applicants Should Familiarize Themselves with the Data

So does the data tell the story? You bet it does. As Michael T. Nietzel writes for Forbes in a piece entitled “The Road Seldom Traveled: Transfer Student Acceptance Rates At Ivy League Colleges,” “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%.” Thus, if you do wish to transfer to an Ivy League university, just understand your odds. At Ivy Coach, we help students each and every year earn admission to Ivy League schools as transfer applicants. But before we ever begin, we want them to understand precisely what they’re up against. It’s only right!

Have a question about Ivy League transfer admission statistics? Let us know your question by posting it below. We look forward to hearing from you!