Transfer Students’ Numbers Drop

Continuing a five-year downward trend in the number of transfer students at the College, Harvard did not accept any transfer applicants for spring 2003, cutting the total number of accepted transfers for 2002-03 by about 35 percent from last year, according to Transfer and Visiting Student Programs Coordinator Julia G. Fox.

The latest drop has made getting into Harvard as a transfer a nearly superhuman feat.

About 1,100 students applied to transfer to the College last year, yielding a microscopic acceptance rate of 3 percent.

In recent years, the College took as many as 75 or 80 transfer students annually, of which about one-third typically came in the spring.

But as fewer students have chosen to live off-campus or take leaves of absence, the number of beds available to transfer students guaranteed housing has dropped, forcing Byerly Hall to come uncomfortably close to dropping below a desirable “critical mass” of transfer students, according to Director of Admissions Marlyn McGrath Lewis ’70-’73.

“We all agree that transfer students are some of our very best students,” she said.

McGrath Lewis said the decision on how many transfer students to admit is made jointly by admissions, College and Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) officials long before students must decide if they will take time off from Harvard. Given the unpredictability of those numbers and the general downward trend in available beds, she said, “we try to be conservative” in how many transfer students to accept.

This year, the cap was set at 35 students, an estimate that did turn out to be low. Twenty or so transfer students—last year’s total from the spring—could have been accommodated, said College Housing Officer David Woodberry.

“This is not a message that we don’t want intercollegiate transfers in the spring,” Woodberry said.

McGrath Lewis said members of former Dean of FAS Jeremy R. Knowles’ staff asked her to reduce the number of transfer applicants accepted for 2002-03.

Eliminating spring transfers as a way to meet the pre-set cap of 35 transfers was not a policy decision, McGrath Lewis said, but resulted from the difficulty for students to pick up concentration tutorial sequences at midyear.

The students who expressed interest in concentrations that could incorporate spring transfers simply were not as strong candidates as those who could only transfer in the fall.

“Most departments are not very accommodating [of midyear transfers],” she said.

McGrath Lewis said she does not think the drop in acceptances will continue. Given renovations of the Jordans in Pforzheimer House and other housing improvements yielding a few dozen more beds, plus Harvard’s newly liberalized study abroad policies, transfer acceptances might rebound in the near future, she said.

“It’s hard to imagine that housing will be tighter [in the future],” she said. “It’s not a fixed number at this low level.”

—Dan Rosenheck can be reached at rosenhec@fas.harvard.edu.