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Do schools offer scholarships to transfer students? Or do they feel like you don't deserve a scholarship because you didn't earn your first year grades at their institution?

It might be more accurate to say that they feel they do not need to give you a scholarship because they are doing you a favor by letting you transfer in at all.

Scholarships are a bargaining chip. Schools do not care who "deserves" a scholarship. They only give them out when they need to. That is why, for example, most schools will not give a scholarship to a student who applies for a binding early decision. They know they have you locked down, why should they spend money on you? Same thing for transfers.

Generally, scholarships are not offered to transfers. I'm basing this on the shared experiences of a number of posters in prior cycles. Generally, moving up is considered valuable, and thus schools know people will be willing to pay full price for it, and if someone isn't, they can find another willing transfer applicant who is. Transfer classes are tiny compared to overall admissions, so there's no need to award money to students to get them to attend. They should want to attend already without any scholarship enticement.

That said, the schools that award need-based aid do those calculations just the same for transfers as they do other students. I'm speaking from personal experience here, and it just so happened that the school I transferred up to gave me more in need-based grants than I was previously getting in merit scholarships. I kind of lucked out that way, but this only is likely to matter at schools that give large amounts of need-based aid (HYS).

vanwinkle wrote:Generally, scholarships are not offered to transfers. I'm basing this on the shared experiences of a number of posters in prior cycles. Generally, moving up is considered valuable, and thus schools know people will be willing to pay full price for it, and if someone isn't, they can find another willing transfer applicant who is. Transfer classes are tiny compared to overall admissions, so there's no need to award money to students to get them to attend. They should want to attend already without any scholarship enticement.

That said, the schools that award need-based aid do those calculations just the same for transfers as they do other students. I'm speaking from personal experience here, and it just so happened that the school I transferred up to gave me more in need-based grants than I was previously getting in merit scholarships. I kind of lucked out that way, but this only is likely to matter at schools that give large amounts of need-based aid (HYS).

/suppuku

I still get pissed at myself occasionally for doing Chicago ED transfer when I probably could have gotten in to Harvard if I had waited. I would have gotten the absolute max of need-based aid, probably cut back my loans by $90k