<p>Most people say they love the school. Who doesn’t? What is the transfer rate? And key themes among transfers?</p>
<p>No information? Maybe no trends…Thanks anyway.</p>
<p>I’m not sure you can geta a response to your question on this board considering the graduation rate at Amherst is 96%.</p>
<p>Not many people transfer away from Amherst, and I doubt that the school wants to publicize those who do. I was very, very close to transferring my sophomore year, to the point of applying to other schools. I ended up staying because a lot of my credits wouldn’t transfer, and I wanted to graduate in four years. For me, the things that are the worst are the location–I find Western Massachusetts absolutely miserable–and the fact that the administration tends to treat the students like we are children who are incapable of running our own lives. I know lots of people with their own gripes about the school, but even when the perceived negatives of Amherst outweigh the perceived positives, the extra difficulties of transferring often make it easier to just stick it out until graduation.</p>
<p>It’s not uncommon for people to take a year or so off from school or just plain drop out, though, and it’s hard to know whether those who drop out eventually start up again elsewhere. I know one girl who transfered to UConn to be closer to home and friends from high school, and I heard about someone who left because she was offered amazing research opportunities at a larger school, but that’s all I know for sure.</p>
<p>I’m sure many people enrolled at Amherst contemplate transferring, either frivolously or seriously. However, most realize that it’s exceedingly difficult to near impossible to transfer into a school that is as good as, or better than, Amherst. </p>
<p>The transfer process itself is extremely troublesome: acquiring letters of recommendation from professors and the class dean, actually having “compelling academic reasons” for transfer.</p>
<p>The town of Amherst is a miraculous godsend relative to Poughkeepsie (NY), Middlebury (VT), Haverford ¶, and Williamstown, IMO.</p>
<p>Amherst’s retention rate is second only to that of Harvard… I guess everyone’s either happy, complacent, or numb, then.</p>
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<p>Really? I have found the exact opposite to be true. Especially compared to what I have seen and heard from friends at other schools, I have found the Amherst administration to be very accommodating. What specifically led you to that conclusion?</p>
<p>Thank you so much for your thoughtful responses. They are helpful.</p>
<p>Catfish-
The administration, and even more the faculty, are certainly very accomodating in regards to academic matters. My problems lie more with the way Amherst sees it necessary to prevent us from living at all independently when this time should really be a transition to adult life. The single dining hall and (essentially) single meal plan seem horribly outdated and innefficient, and are absolutely not in the students’ best interest. There is also a weird lack of apartment-style living, which all of my friends’ schools have, from a private school of 500 to a public university of 25,000. In fact, Amherst is moving away from dorms that give any semblance of indepedence, as it removes the kitchens from the dorms it renovates and has closed down a third of the dorms left with kitchens. At the same time, new construction is heavily favoring residence halls over suites, which are currently our only option in seeking a little control over your environment. If you want to be in charge of your own life, you really have to move off campus, which is hard when the entire school operates on the assumption that the students live a five-minutes walk away. While the academic freedom offered by Amherst is what brought me here in the first place, it can’t quite balance out the bizarre restrictions on our lifestyles.</p>
<p>I know a girl who transferred from Amherst to Wellesley – perhaps she wanted a school with a closer proximity to Boston? I would think that most other aspects of the two schools to be about the same; Wellesley is a bit larger though.</p>
<p>katbenc, Amherst is a residential campus. Didn’t you realize this when you applied/enrolled? The sense is the campus as a community.</p>
<p>lol, I heard some students at Wellesley expressing the same frustrations when I visited. Trust me, I’ve been living on my own for awhile while working and going to school full time… I’m more than happy to be coddled by Amherst. I’m like, wait, I don’t have to look for housing, stress about roommates, or worry about having enough food in my refrigerator? You’re going to have the rest of your life to be independent. Just enjoy your time at Amherst cause you’re not going to get an experience like it again. If you really hate living on campus, opt to live off campus. I know an incoming transfer student that’s living off campus. It’s not like Amherst forces you to stay on campus. As for the meal plan, you don’t have to purchase one. If you want to eat out every day, you can. You have options. </p>
<p>Question, don’t most students try to avoid the “social” dorms because they’re noisy and party dorms? Couldn’t that be a reason why Amherst is favoring halls over suites?</p>
<p>Great perspectives on the residence situation. If this is the primary basis for transferring then I can understand why it is such an amazing place – not to minimize the learning that comes from residential experiences!</p>
<p>I’d wondered about student satisfaction in two other areas which were not really mentioned. Their absence suggests to me that they may not important in the transfer process (that along with the small number of transfers);</p>
<ol>
<li> Cross-cultural academic breadth. There seem to be some intellectual spaces and voices regarding African Americans in the U.S. including a major track, theme house, professors representation and some emphasis on Asian studies as well. What of Latino studies? Professors and courses? Pomona and I think Swarthmore are small but have these concentrations.<br></li>
</ol>
<p>I wonder, anyone know of students who find themselves disappointed with Amherst’s offerings to the point of transferring? The 5 college consortium offers breadth but seems challenging to access for non-drivers, esp in the Winter.</p>
<ol>
<li> Social life. Some people who have posted on Amherst’s site have suggested that it can be cliquish. Anyone know of people who leave for this reason?</li>
</ol>
<p>In general, few people transfer out of top LACs. I don’t how to get the numbers, but they probably have some relationship to the number of students who transfer in. For top LACs, this number is often in the single digits. At [url=<a href=“http://www.williams.edu/admission/apply_transfer.php]Williams[/url”>http://www.williams.edu/admission/apply_transfer.php]Williams[/url</a>], for example, only 3 to 6 transfer students have been enrolled annually in recent years. The numbers at Amherst are probably comparable. </p>
<p>I believe that Middlebury temporarily stopped accepting transfer applications not long ago, because they just did not foresee any openings in their classes.</p>
<p>You’re looking at such small numbers that it’s hard to generalize. One factor with any top-ranked school is that sometimes people decide to attend even if it’s a poor fit, because “it’s the best school that I got into”. This is a recipe for future dissatisfaction. </p>
<p>The demand for the few available transfer slots at LACs tends to be very high, and so LACs commonly have much lower transfer acceptance rates than regular acceptance rates. The Williams statistics, for example, show that fewer than 10% of transfer applicants are accepted. Again, Amherst is probably comparable.</p>
<p>I wonder why you’re asking about transferring from Amherst instead of transferring to Amherst. As far as transfer rates, Amherst took 15 students from 400 for the Fall of '09 with a 3.7% acceptance rate. Middlebury didn’t accept transfer students only one year when they over enrolled. This year, Middlebury accepted 24 students from a pool of 218, 11%.</p>
<p>If a school uses the Common Data Set, you can look up transfer acceptance and enrollment stats in Part D. It seems likely that the number of transfers out are comparable in number to the transfers in. </p>
<p>You can also see that many LACs have very low transfer acceptance rates, which implies that the demand to transfer into LACs is much higher than the supply of slots opening up by people transferring out. The 3.7% transfer acceptance rate for Amherst, as posted above, is probably one of the lowest in the country. For comparison, here are a few others that I found in the CDS:</p>
<p>Bowdoin: 196 transfer applications, 6 accepted, 3.1% transfer acceptance rate
Williams: 184 transfers applied, 8 accepted, 4.3% transfer acceptance rate</p>
<p>Yale (for comparison): 751 transfers applied, 24 accepted, 3.2% acceptance rate</p>
<p>Middlebury did not accept tranfers for several years, but just did as OCCTransfer reported, largely because of a huge senior class graduating and the desire not to increase the size of the first-year class so as to create a 3-year bulge in enrollment and unequal size classes. Typically, the most selective LACs have very low acceptance rates for transfers. The absolute number of acceptances are due to unexpected large classes a few years before and not high transfer out rates.</p>