Someone mentioned the lack of tutorials. Any school that requires independent work has tutorials, because a professor has to oversee the work, and the meetings with the prof are normally one-on-one.
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.
@Mastadon you can’t have it both ways, small classes and unlimited enrollment……
Princeton appears to be looking mostly for non-traditional students in transfer admissions; such students are probably rare among frosh applicants. Stanford appears similar in this respect.
Basically, they are looking for a few top-end students in a pool that they would otherwise be ignoring if they have only frosh admissions.
That is only Princeton, perhaps other choices for Transfer students may be more accepting???