Freshmen invited to new colleges

By Jocelyn Wright     2/18/10 6:00pm

If you have somehow missed the multiple invitations and guest passes but are still interested in transferring to Duncan College or McMurtry College, you are in luck: Applications to transfer to either of the new colleges are still being accepted, and invitations have been extended to the freshmen at Baker College, Brown College, Hanszen College and Wiess College. The Office of the Dean of the Undergraduates elected to extend applications to freshmen at these four colleges because they had the fewest number of transfers overall. Two rounds of invitations were sent out, one last week and one last Monday, inviting first-year students from those colleges to transfer, Associate Dean of Undergraduates Matthew Taylor said.

"When we set out to recruit students for the new colleges, one of our primary goals was to try to distribute the draw fairly evenly, if we could," Taylor said.

Though the possibility of freshmen transferring was discussed at the beginning of this year, Taylor said his office, in conjunction with the college masters and presidents, reconsidered the possibility after it became clear that not all of the beds in the new colleges would be occupied next year.

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"Second-semester freshmen are certainly very different than first-semester freshmen, and it didn't feel too out-of-character to give them the opportunity to consider transferring," Taylor said.

He said first-year students are still very different from upperclassmen, so freshmen wishing to transfer must answer a question, "Why do you want to transfer?", specify the college to which they want to transfer and must also get the approval of the master of the college from which they are leaving and at the college to which they would like to transfer. Duncan has already selected its masters, and McMurtry is waiting for President David Leebron to make a decision on their final two candidates. Taylor's office is also capping the number of first-year transfers at 10 students per college. He said the cap came from his office's experiences with the first two rounds of invitations.

"To our surprise, at least at a couple of colleges there was a pretty sharp imbalance between the rising juniors and the rising seniors who are transferring, and everyone agrees that it would have been better to have balance," Taylor said.

As of Wednesday, Taylor said 22 freshmen had applied to transfer and several had already been approved. The college with the most number of freshmen applying to transfer was Hanszen, with nine students planning to join the new colleges. Though most of the people requesting to transfer specified that they wanted to transfer to either Duncan or McMurtry, Taylor said approximately 20 percent of the applicants did not.

Though increasing the population of each of the colleges is a concern, Wiess Master Michael Gustin said financial factors were also at play.

"The financial folks said that they want to fill the beds in the new colleges, and [the Dean's office] is under pressure to do so," Gustin said.

Though not every bed at each of the colleges is full every year, there is a limit to the number of empty beds that is financially viable for the university to maintain. Taylor said his office was still waiting to hear the number of vacancies the university would be willing to tolerate. In the meantime, Taylor said his office was working to fill as many of these beds as possible with transfers from other colleges.

Currently, none of the colleges has reached their cap of 35 transfer students. Jones College, which originally had exceeded its cap with 40 transfers, now has only 33 students transferring. Taylor said his office is considering applications to transfer from students at any college, but that they sent the invitation to the freshmen because they felt this was a segment of the student body that had not yet had the opportunity to transfer.

"The feeling was that we had really hit the rising juniors and seniors and that everybody who wanted to come had the opportunity to do so," Taylor said. "We also didn't want to go back in and restir the pot publicly in the colleges because [at] some colleges we had been told there was a lot of pressure brought to bear on the people considering transferring."

Taylor said the process would likely be closed by room draw, which is typically around mid-March for most colleges.

"It wouldn't be a healthy thing for the campus or for Duncan and McMurtry if the motivations of people transferring were just because they got bumped," Taylor said.

If there are still beds remaining after the transfer process is closed, Taylor said his office has several options for filling them. Duncan and McMurtry will have larger freshman classes than other colleges, with approximately 100 students as opposed to approximately 80 students, which will help fill some of the empty beds. Taylor said the two new colleges would also get a larger number of transfer students than is usual.

"We think some combination of the first-year students applying to transfer, the larger freshman class and new transfers will get us pretty close to capacity at each building," Taylor said.

If there are still more empty beds than the university can tolerate, Taylor said a limited number of spots at each college might be opened up to students at other colleges who had been kicked off campus but who wanted to live on campus. These students would retain their college affiliations while living at the new colleges. Taylor said students, presidents and masters at both new colleges had expressed concern about having to share their buildings with students from other colleges, though, which was one of the reasons his office was first working to fill the vacancies with transfers from other colleges. Taylor said the need to fill the colleges on campus would not affect admissions.

"The admissions numbers don't have a hand in that conversation," Taylor said. "But the finances of growth are related to housing supply and the pace at which we grow, so the size of the first-year class ... which I think they're pretty close to setting, is going to be a little larger."

As of Dec. 4, Taylor estimated his office had invited about one-third of the eligible 1,362 rising juniors and seniors to transfer, but that many more students were invited as guests.

Wiess College freshman Emily Viehman said that although she had no interest in transferring, she felt it was appropriate to invite freshmen to transfer to the new colleges.

"You want to have a balanced class body," Viehman said. "It opens doors to new relationships with people that are friends. A transfer from Sid Richardson College could be friends with a freshman at McMurtry. I felt like there isn't a lot of communication or interaction between North and South campuses, so it could help facilitate that.

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