Stratification in college application materials is a contentious topic in social science and national discourse in the United States. This line of research has also started to use computational methods to consider qualitative materials, such as personal statements and letters of recommendation. Despite the prominence of this topic, fewer studies have considered a fairly common academic pathway: transferring. Approximately 40\% of all college students in the United States transfer schools at least once. One quirk of the system is that students from community colleges are applying for the same spots for students already enrolled in four year schools and trying to transfer. How might these different institutional experiences and the transfer application itself reflect social stratification? We leverage a dataset of 20,532 transfer admissions essays submitted to the University of California system to describe how transfer applicants are stratified linguistically, culturally, and narratively with respect to academic pathways and essay prompts. These results show different types of stratification that can emerge in educational processes intended to equalize opportunity and how combining computational and human reading might illuminate them.