Your School Is Extremely Elitest/Stuck-Up

Silly_Puddy
Thu, 14 Feb 2008 04:17:29 +0000

A high retention rate doesn’t necessarily mean that there isn’t any room for transfers, as is shown by other schools with similar retention rates (e.g. Harvard). (And Harvard really isn’t that much bigger than Princeton.) There are also schools that have room for ~10 transfer students a year (e.g., Caltech). Surely, Princeton has room for a few more than that.



Note that retention rate only reflects so much. It doesn’t tell you, for example, how many students are studying abroad in a semester or, say, the number of people who take a year off between years. And when 10 or 20 people make the difference between whether the school will accept transfers or not, it’s far from inconceivable that inter-school differences/trends between Princeton and Harvard are the reason for differing policies.

Also important is that schools just place priorities on different things. Look at MIT, for example. MIT accepts a handful of transfers each year, yet as it is, the school’s dorms are overcrowded. I’m sure that if Princeton decided that this was a tolerable price to pay, then it could also take in a few transfer students. Now, I personally find it laudable that MIT still takes on transfer students, but it’s far from obvious that a school should be further crowding its existing students to take on new ones. That is, MIT has one philosophy, Princeton has another. It’s not immediately obvious to me that Princeton’s (or MIT’s) is wrong.

Finally, I should note that the administration wants to be able to take on transfer students. If you look at the Wythes report - the one that sparked the move to increase enrollment and build Whitman - you’ll see that a motivation for those actions was to allow the University to open its doors to transfers, which the report recognized as another source of talent. So perhaps in the near future, Princeton will allow transfer applications.