What do top colleges have against transfer students?

Boondocks
Fri, 07 Sep 2018 00:15:11 +0000

At a reunion, someone told me that Princeton’s admissions office felt they could admit five classes from the freshman pool without decreasing quality. Admissions is heavily burdened at schools that routinely turn down valedictorians and ultimately accept only 5% to 15% of their applicants.

Ask an admissions officer how bleary-eyed life gets when they get down to making the final decisions. Days are endless, running late into the nights and taking over weekends.

If the administrations of these colleges require admissions to reserve a large number of spots for transfers, it will open the floodgates. The additional applicants will overload an already overloaded staff, cost the school money (admissions scrutiny costs more than the application fees charged), and probably not add too much to the student body, considering that they would then be turning down even more well-qualified freshman applicants (who are likely going to apply to Princeton, Harvard, Stanford or Yale regardless of what the admissions percentage is).

Admitting 13 out of 1300 transfer applicants seems to be more work than it was worth for Princeton (and I believe Harvard accepts 15 transfer applicants out of about 1500 - someone correct me if I’m wrong here). If the applicants knew there were even more spots available or their chances were higher than 1%, countless more transfer applicants would apply.