With Strict Rules, Students Stay Put

Swan Sit's decision to transfer from Cabot House to Winthrop wasn't an instance of a roommate-gone-bad or an excessive hatred of the Quad.

Instead, Sit '99-'00 says that when she returned from a year abroad in London, her blockmates had graduated and the House just wasn't the same.

"It's kind of a chicken and egg thing," she says. "I don't know if the suburban environment is what makes people quiet, or if they're quiet when they come, but when they graduated, the House definitely changed."

Sit's successful transfer is not unusual--it's one of hundreds of attempts to switch Houses since the dawn of randomization.

But despite fears that randomized housing assignments would cause the inter-House transfer rate to balloon, the number of transfer applications has remained relatively steady.

The numbers seem to speak for themselves.

This spring, the College accepted 97 out of 121 House transfer applications for next year.

But in the spring of 1996, just before randomization was implemented, even more students--a total of 171--applied for transfers.

This past year, nearly 85 percent of 145 total transfer applications were successful--a percentage in line with, if slightly higher than, that of past years.

Part of the lack of change in the rate of transfers may have to do with the College's strict restrictions on entrances to and exits from Houses. Each House sets a cap on how many students of each gender and class year can transfer in.

Students who want to transfer from their House as individuals, or as part of a group whose members are all from the same House, can eliminate two Houses into which they would not like to be moved.

Groups of transferring students from multiple Houses can cross off three choices--one of which must be a House where a member of the transfer group lives.

Those who simply want to join a rooming group in another House, on the other hand, can attempt to transfer if a space opens up in a room in that House or if the rooming group agrees to host the transfer in its existing suite.

What's more, the Undergraduate Housing Office gives priority first to those who have unsuccessfully applied for transfers before and then to students based on seniority.

According to Associate Dean of the College for Human Resources and the House System Thomas A. Dingman '67, the College also makes an attempt to preserve class and gender balance in the Houses.

"There are limits because wholesale movements out of a house make it difficult for a House to survive," Dingman says.

All of these restrictions mean the success of a transfer application is anything but a sure thing.

Dingman says the current transfer procedure is a compromise between those people who believe eliminating transfers is "the best shot at building [House] community" and those who want to "swing the door open and allow anybody to go anywhere."

"It ended up being a process that addressed the concerns on both sides," Dingman says.

But in addition, Dingman says he believes the steady transfer rate may indicate that randomization has not turned out to be the demon that some have portrayed it to be.

"Students always talk about how randomization has led to this general blandness, but that's not what the numbers say," Dingman says.

He points to the College's annual survey of graduating seniors, which measures satisfaction with the Houses.

The survey's average rating for House life satisfaction this year--3.6 out of 5--is actually slightly above the average satisfaction before randomization, Dingman says, suggesting that some concerns about the effects of randomization were unfounded.

And though the limits on transfer applications may deter some students, Sit says the process isn't that much more complicated than everything else at Harvard.

"They make you jump through a few hoops but it wasn't too bad," Sit says.