Is there a way to copy STATS collected on a table to a duplicate table?

We have a process which we refer to as CLONE TABLE Processing. Basically when we are required to modify a large table rather than performing an ALTER TABLE we create a new table with the new attributes required and perform a FASTLOAD or INSERT INTO.

The process to duration to make the changes this way out performs ALTER TABLE for large tables. the problem is collecting stats takes a long time. We are also noticing that table sizes increase dramatically if we alter table vs performing clone table processing. In a recent example we increased a table size by 100GB by adding a single attribute using alter VS CLONE... very strange.