When Three is as Good as Four

After ranking nearly every aspect of my college experience on a scale from one to five, the last question on the College’s Senior Survey asked me what the most memorable part of Harvard has been. The answer that popped into my head was “being here.” Which I wouldn’t have been, were it not for the now-defunct transfer admissions program.

There are some things we’d be better off without: jaywalking laws, spam (definitely the email kind, maybe the “food” kind too), pollution. But as I finish my third and final year as a student at Harvard, and as the college has quietly done away with transfer admissions a year after announcing a two-year suspension of the program, I continue to hope that Harvard doesn’t permanently decide that transfer students are one of the things the school is better off without than with. I fear that institutional inertia will lead Harvard to continue along its current path rather than return to what was, but in this case, it’s worth it to overcome that inertia.

The temporary suspension of transfer admissions was explained last March as the result of overcrowded upperclass Houses that, when taking into account the number of students who would already be living in the Houses in the 2008-2009 and 2009-2010 academic years, could not feasibly take on the burden of any more students. Could the school not even accept 12 transfer students per year? That would amount to a grand total of one additional resident of each House.

While we are all intimately familiar with the overcrowded nature of many or most of the Houses, the value of having a transfer program outweighs the very small number of extra beds gained by not having one, a number that does not actually ease overcrowding to any considerable degree. Moreover, there are some extra beds here and there in the Houses; I lived this year with four other people in what is typically a six-person suite. I would have happily sacrificed having two common rooms for the continuation of the transfer program. Certainly I recognize that my living situation this year is the exception and not the rule and that it was not predictable, but it does show that there is some room for movement.

Moreover, Harvard really did the transfer process right—something of which no student at the college will soon have any recollection. Our orientation, which was longer than freshman orientation, was led exclusively—save for two mandatory meetings—by students who had transferred in previous semesters. The required meetings were not “Sex Signals” or anything of the like but simply relayed to us academic-related information that we needed to know. The rest of the week consisted of optional social events and meals. In turn, this set-up placed very little responsibility on Harvard’s administrative resources, adding only a minimal amount of work to their Freshman Week load.

A friend of mine who transferred to Yale as a sophomore was assigned to live in Old Campus, the equivalent of a second-year student here living in the Yard. At another school where I was accepted as a transfer student, all the literature I received welcomed me to the class of 2010—the freshman class that year, not the class I would actually be entering. Harvard treated its transfers both as transfers and as students older than freshmen. At the champagne brunch in Annenberg earlier this spring, acquaintances and casual friends asked what freshman entryway I had lived in. When I told them I had transferred here, they were completely surprised. It’s a shame to see something that Harvard did so well fall by the wayside.

My fellow transfer students are some of the happiest people I know here, with an outside point of view and basis for comparison that allow for a heightened appreciation of all that Harvard has to offer. The student body as a whole benefits from this diversity of perspective that transfers bring in and suffers without it. Harvard must be able to admit that mistakes can be made: A student could have made a mistake not applying to or not choosing Harvard the first time around, and the admissions office could have made a mistake in not accepting a student the first time around.

When I was considering transferring during my freshman year of college, I looked with disdain upon Princeton when I learned that it was— at the time—the only other Ivy League school that did not accept transfer students. I thought that it represented a brand of elitism that was unique to Princeton. That school remains Harvard’s only Ivy League partner-in-crime in this decision. And, outside of the Ivy League, top schools like Stanford, Duke, the University of Chicago, Amherst, Williams, and Swarthmore all accept transfer students. Harvard should be as concerned about losing strong potential transfer students to these schools as it is for regular admissions.

Harvard would do well not to close the door after freshman year: There’s a lot to be gained from transfer admissions by everyone involved.


Victoria B. Kabak ‘09, a former Crimson news executive, is a social studies concentrator in Kirkland House.