Xavier Garcia sat at a welcome dinner the evening of move-in day at USC, shoulders straight, shirt tucked, hands folded over a notebook filled with questions to ask and people to meet.
With Ds in high school and no family with college degrees, he once had dismissed the possibility of attending a private school. But at Sacramento City College, he had buckled down. Now here he was, a transfer student at the so-called University of Spoiled Children.
Transferring into an elite private college is not easy. Princeton hasn’t taken a transfer in more than two decades, according to the latest data from the National Center for Education Statistics. In the fall of 2015, Stanford enrolled 15 transfer students; Yale, 24. Cornell and Georgetown University, known for accepting transfers, took in 497 and 186, respectively.
USC, by contrast, accepted 1,505 transfers from 350 colleges. They made up almost one-third of its new undergraduates. About 800, like Garcia, transferred from a community college. Many were the first in their families to attend college. Most were on financial aid.
Read more at The Los Angeles Times: http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-usc-transfers-20170605-story.html