is this a dirty little secret about universities and community colleges?

Something that I’ve learned in trying to find out more about merit scholarship opportunities:  they’re virtually all reserved for students entering as freshman.

If you study at a community college, then transfer, you’re out of luck.

Is there a risk of losing a chance at a merit scholarship because you combined dual enrollment, AP classes, and even taking a community college class on your own, say, during the summer?  An expert at a school parent night seemed to suggest this was the case.  (Though I would expect that universities assign transfer credits for your AP exams until after admission and scholarship-awarding has already occurred, so I don’t know.)

But this really seems to penalize students to take the more cost-effective path of studying at a community college first, and could torpedo plans to make the community college transfer route the norm; at any rate, even if most kids considering this path are going to be getting need-based financial aid rather than merit-based money, this still speaks poorly of universities’ willingness to cooperate with this alternate model.

Image: “LibrePlanet 2014 27” by Lionel Allorge – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons – http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:LibrePlanet_2014_27.jpg#mediaviewer/File:LibrePlanet_2014_27.jpg