As colleges have begun releasing admissions information, it is clear that getting into a top university as a freshman is as difficult as it has ever been, with low acceptance rates across the board at some of the nation’s top universities. These low rates mean many students are unable to attend their top choice school, and are left looking for other options. Many students end up thriving at a college they did not expect to, but others know that only one school will properly serve their needs. These students turn instead to transfer admissions, something we have written about before, and frequently help students with. One question that comes up often, though, is how success rates for transfer students compare to those of freshmen, especially as top colleges grow ever more competitive.
In this article then, we’re going to look at transfer acceptance rates for top colleges for the 2024-25 admissions cycle. Not all colleges have released these numbers yet, but we will note that as well. Once we’ve done that, we’re going to look at what these rates mean, and how transfer acceptances are changing over time. Let’s get started!
Transfer Acceptance Rates at Top Colleges
Our data here comes from the Common Data Set, a collection of admissions statistics released by most colleges. If a college has not yet released this data for 2024-25, we have left an N/A in that column.
| College | Transfer Acceptance Rate 2024-25 |
| Boston College | N/A |
| Brown | 7.2% |
| Caltech | 6.2% |
| Carnegie Mellon | 5.6% |
| Columbia | N/A |
| Cornell | 9.3% |
| Dartmouth | 6.7% |
| Duke | N/A |
| Emory | 16.2% |
| Georgetown | 5.9% |
| Harvard | N/A |
| Johns Hopkins | 5.3% |
| MIT | N/A |
| NYU | 22.1% |
| Northwestern | N/A |
| Notre Dame | 25.1% |
| Princeton | 1.9% |
| Rice | N/A |
| Stanford | 1.6% |
| UC Berkeley | 25.5% |
| UCLA | 22.7% |
| UChicago | N/A |
| University of Michigan | 34.9% |
| UNC Chapel Hill | 36.5% |
| UPenn | N/A |
| USC | N/A |
| UT Austin | 22.5% |
| Vanderbilt | 21.8% |
| WashU | N/A |
| Yale | 1.5% |
A few notes on this data. First, some schools haven’t released this data yet, but intend to do so soon. There is a lot of data to process, and filing a Common Data Set takes time. Other schools, Harvard notable among them, have announced that they will not be releasing this data until later in the year, with a goal of reducing stress on high school applicants. While this is a noble goal, we do not believe this is the best approach to achieve those ends.
The other note is that these are just the transfer acceptance rates from this admissions cycle; in the next section, we will explore the volatility of these rates, and how they compare to freshman admissions.
What Does This Transfer Acceptance Data Tell Us?
There are several things this data reveals to us, the first being that a college’s transfer acceptance rate does not necessarily correlate with their freshman acceptance rate. There are parallels of course; schools that are hard to get into as a freshman are generally also hard to get into as a transfer. But the degree of difficulty can shift, often dramatically. For this reason, if you are planning on transferring, you should always look up a school’s transfer acceptance rate; don’t rely on your knowledge of freshman admissions and assume that applies.
Next, notable outliers on this list are the public schools, which have far higher transfer acceptance rates than the bulk of the private colleges we listed. There are several reasons for this. First, many public colleges have some form of guaranteed transfer program for in-state students who meet certain requirements; UT Austin and the UC system both provide examples of this.
In addition, these numbers do not differentiate between in-state and out-of-state students for these public colleges. Just as with freshman admissions, these schools do tend to prioritize in-state students; while this is not the case for every public school, it is for ones like UCLA and UT Austin.
This data does not differentiate between different colleges within a university, or between majors. While not every school handles admissions this way, many do, and some majors are much harder to get into than others, whether through freshman admissions or as a transfer student. This is perhaps unsurprising, but looking at these numbers alone can hide that fact.
A final thing that stands out is that transfer admission rates seem to settle in broad bands. It is hard to say exactly which schools are in which bands due to incomplete data, but observationally, there are the extremely competitive schools, with acceptances rates under 2%, the very competitive schools, with acceptance rates under 10%, and the merely competitive schools, with acceptance rates over 20%.
The reason these distinctions exist is due to how transfer admissions works on a macro scale; every student has their own reasons to transfer, but as a population, most students either transfer to a more competitive school, or one equally competitive to the one they are in now. This is not universally true of course, but does hold for the majority of students.
Thus the most prestigious schools have the most interest from transfer students, and often the fewest students transferring out. UCLA is a great school, but loses students every year as they transfer to Stanford or Caltech. Dartmouth, by contrast, tends to only lose students to Ivy League peers, or other Ivy+ schools. Yale loses fewer students still, but has a great number wanting to get in.
This is perhaps the biggest difference in transfer admissions compared to freshmen. The number of spaces for freshmen at a university is pretty constant. It may vary by a few dozen year to year, but it is not an elastic number. Transfer admissions is far more variable, and the number of spaces available at top schools can be far lower; Yale accepted well under 100 students via transfer admissions in 2025.
What Does This Mean for You?
If you are looking to change what college you attend, then you want to look not just at acceptance rates, but how many transfer students the schools you are considering admitted in years past. This will enable you to more accurately gauge your chances of success, and build a reasonable list of colleges to apply to.
Of course, building a list of transfer colleges is often far less balanced than building your initial college list, but this data should hopefully put that in perspective. As freshman admissions rates drop, more students are considering whether or not transferring is their best chance to get into their top choice school. We believe it can be a good option, but that you should enter the process with foreknowledge of your chances of success.
Finally, you should look at how transfer acceptance rates fluctuate year to year. These often have less-clear trends than freshman admissions rates, but can give you a sense of how many students they have leave the school on average every year, and how many spaces applicants are competing for.
Final Thoughts
Transfer admissions is not something that every student engages with, but it is core to the college process for some students. We hope that this article has given you insight into the state of transfer admissions in 2025, and how this can impact your own decisions on where and how to transfer. The more you know about how the process works and what your odds are, the more successful you are liable to be.
As with freshman admissions, transferring is not a process you need to take on alone. Ivy Scholars has a long history of helping students with the transfer admissions process, from finding the best school for you to apply to, to helping you construct your transfer application strategy. Schedule a free consultation today to learn how we can help you with the transfer process, and how we can help maximize your chances of transfer acceptance.
