Why Students Transfer:
Rotten campus culture sows seeds of discontent
by J.p. Lawrence
Luke Brossman came to Bard College last fall a Colorado boy enamored with the idea of college on the East Coast. He brought a banjo, a guitar and those high school dreams of finding friends that last a lifetime.
Bard had drawn him in with promises of its top-notch academics, its sense of individuality, and its proximity to the New York City. Brossman only went to the big city once, with his aunt, before deciding to transfer.
This spring semester, Brossman will begin his education at the University of Puget Sound near Tacoma, Wash. Bard’s registrar’s office said they do not keep exact figures on the number of transfers, but official records report that 12% of Bard students will drop out or transfer during their career at Annandale - a number that reached 26% as recently as 2005, according to Forbes Magazine.
These students usually transfer for a number of reasons. Money. A desire to be closer to home. Money. Academic and athletic programs. Money.
But over and over again, a common element emerges at the source of each student’s story: a little seed of discontent that grows with every smile rebuffed, every nod ignored, every morning greeting dismissed with a quick look away.
Brossman, tall and gangly and eager to please, almost to a fault, said he didn’t find many friends his first few months at Bard. It was an experience he shared with many students who transferred from Bard. The students the Free Press spoke to said they found Bard’s campus culture “stifling,” “cliquey,” and “boring,” a place where antisocial and unfriendly students formed small, exclusive groups.
All students, to some extent, struggle to integrate into a new environment, but for many of the students who transferred, the constant chilliness took its toll.
Students like Michelle Strayer, who transferred at the end of her freshman year, said they felt isolated at Bard. Strayer considered herself outgoing and friendly, but said she simply could not connect with students at Bard.
The students were aloof. Her interactions were always one-sided.
Strayer loved her classes, loved the teachers, the individuality. But within the first few weeks of classes she knew she wanted to transfer.
“Everyone assured me that the first semester was always hard and that I would find my niche,” Strayer said.
But she didn’t.
She knew for sure she needed to leave at the end of Thanksgiving break. After saying goodbye to her boyfriend at the time, she sat in the Penn Station and waited two hours for the Amtrak train back to Bard. She said she cried the entire time.
“The thing that upset me most,” Strayer said, “was simply that I didn’t want to return to Bard.”
She spent Christmas break filling out applications to other colleges.
Bethany Nohlgren has heard many such stories. Every year, Nohlgren, Associate Dean of Student Affairs and Engagement, helps hold group and individual conferences for students thinking of transferring.
Sophomores and upperclassmen tend to leave Bard to pursue specific academic programs, while freshman transfer for many reasons, Nohlgren said, such as money, grades or loneliness.
Nohlgren spends hours each semester talking to freshman who are homesick or don’t feel like they fit in. Her goal, she said, was not to convince them to stay, but to find out what they want but can’t find at Bard. Often, students pine for things that come only with time or are already on campus: a group, a sport, a class or a club.
“Often it’s not the place they’re having a hard time with: it’s their perspective of a place,” Nohlgren said. “If they’re looking for a lot of things that are here, but they don’t know about it, then I try to steer them in that direction.”
Maya Lang, a student who transferred to Yeshiva in the middle of her freshman year, did not talk to Nohlgren very much. Looking back, she said she wishes she had.
A quiet girl with black frizzy hair, Lang came to Bard from France with dreams of going to medical school. Like many Bard students, she first began thinking about transferring during L&T. She went home for Thanksgiving, where her family told her it was much more likely she would get into med school if she left Bard.
Lang came back convinced. She filled out the withdrawal form, requested her transcripts – it was easy. “You just speak with Bethany, and then you leave, come back and bring back the paper,” Lang said. When she came back to return it, no one was there to speak with her. “I just left it in an envelope.”
Then Lang learned from her biology teacher that med schools didn’t care where a student got their undergraduate degree. She was shocked. By this time, she had already delivered all her forms. She had ignored her grades. She had registered for a dorm room and paid her deposit.
She had also made friends, and she felt she might want to stay after all. But in the end, she chose Yeshiva University.
“No one gave me the information I needed to really look and ask around,” Lang said. “I guess I went on my own.”
Nohlgren said she is disappointed when she hears about transfers having bad experiences. She spends hours making transferring as painless as possible, helping students with paperwork and finding new schools.
Less than 50% of the students she talks to end up leaving, Nohlgren said. Bard students simply have a sense of wanderlust, a skepticism that leads them to question their futures.
Despite all this, Bard has a retention rate of 87%, which is typical for a liberal arts school.
A few students every year even come back.
Erica Imbascani, for instance, found the grass outside Bard not as green as she hoped. Imbascani, who transferred at the end of freshman year, came back this fall.
A Staten Island guidette prone to dying her hair purple, Imbascani had her heart set on Bard since her sophomore year of high school. But then she got to Bard and, like many other former students, didn’t fit in. She found herself hanging out exclusively with her boyfriend from high school. “I felt isolated,” Imbascani said. “Maybe I built it up too much.”
She came back home to Staten Island, where two days a week, she’d attend school at Brooklyn College. Four days a week, she’d also take the 90-minute commute to Manhattan. There she worked at a Footlocker, watching people run on treadmills and telling them what shoes to buy. Her days were tiring but unrewarding.
One day she realized she hadn’t sat and read a book in weeks. “I just missed being challenged,” Imbascani said, “and I had a feeling I would never get what I was getting at Bard from Brooklyn.”
Bard’s academic programs and individual attention are the biggest reasons students come back, said Lora Seery, also an Associate Dean of Student Affairs and Engagement, and when they do, Bard makes the process as easy as possible.
Seery, who meets with sophomores who want to transfer out and students who want to transfer in, said she remembers one student who left Bard for a large state institution. After two days of classes, he showed up at her door and asked to transfer back. “He graduated last year,” she said.
In Seery’s mind, everything other than academics – the social scene, the athletics and extracurricular activities – can be addressed. Many students, however, said they were satisfied academically. It was the culture that got them in the end.
Anna Millard, for example, was a brash Bard theater major, resident of Tewksbury Hall, and wholesale subscriber to the Bard ethos. But looking back, her time at Bard was drug-filled and miserable: the same day repeated ad nausea. Nights of just following the crowd, drinking recklessly out of boredom, all to disastrous results. “I felt like a lot of people at Bard are very depressed,” Millard said, “or maybe misery just loves company.”
Millard transferred at the end of the year to a school much nearer to home: Emory College, near Atlanta, Ga. There, she was amazed how happy everyone seemed to be.
Bard needs a happier campus, many former students said, a community to match its academics. Alaric Bruce said he grew tired of “awkward friction” whenever he tried to talk to someone new. Bruce yearned for the school pride he saw on other campuses, with their parties and barbecues and football games.
“There’s no reason for people to care about another student at this school,” Bruce said. “Could you think of one reason to get all 2000 students at this school together and have them all excited about that one thing? Not even 2000 – 500? 400? 200?”
Bruce left for Clemson University in the middle of his sophomore year. He didn’t say goodbye to many within his large circle of friends.
Brossman, for his part, vowed in the coming semester to be friendlier, to work harder on his grades, and to be better dressed. He said he brought too much to Bard. His banjo and half his clothing will stay in Colorado. He will also carry fewer expectations.
“I’m going to take things slowly – I’m not going to have as big of expectations as I did and take things as they come,” Brossman said. “I’m just bringing the essentials. My clothing. A guitar. Some juggling equipment. And bedding.”