In the past several years, SMU has made more and more opportunities available to transfer students in an attempt to better include them in the SMU student body and make them feel like a part of the Mustang community. Even things as seemingly inane as changing the term “freshmen” to “first-years” has been to better comprise all new Mustangs.
Unfortunately, the school continues real policies that work to actively exclude transfer students.
Most notably, and most nonsensically, transfer students are only permitted five semesters of financial aid from the university — regardless of how many hours they transferred in with. As an example, students who transfer in with only a year of credit are forced to graduate from SMU in two and a half years — a semester earlier than most college students.
While we understand that limiting the number of semesters of financial aid available to students is necessary to prevent abuse, we also believe that transfer students should not be forced to rush through their education simply because they transferred in. Additionally, we fail to see the logic in a blanket financial aid policy that applies to all transfer students, when transfer students as a rule have more complicated educational backgrounds than any other group of SMU students.
For most students, SMU actively promotes double and even triple majoring, paired with several minors of students’ choosing because of the flexibility the SMU curriculum offers students. This is actively cited as a reason to attend the school to both incoming high school students and transfer students. Unfortunately, transfer students are largely unable to take advantage of this flexibility because of the limited number of semesters they are given to fit all of their hours in.
Unless a transfer student coming into SMU has an abnormal amount of hours transferring in, it is difficult to see how anyone could make even just a double major work in five short semesters. Those that want to take advantage of this opportunity at all costs are often forced to take large and complicated class loads – putting a greater academic burden on themselves than most other SMU students would be forced to schedule.
Our greatest concern is that this illogical policy forces transfer students to get less of an education than is given by default to all other students that attend SMU. Such a separation in policies between non-transfer and transfer students is exactly what SMU is hoping to avoid, but they have unfortunately overlooked the policy that is most harmful and excluding to transfer students.
Additionally, we find ourselves baffled by the level of concern that SMU gives transfer students in terms of orientation, changing common vocabulary and support and mentor groups while overlooking such a problematic policy. While we understand that SMU is trying to better include transfer students, we feel that the fact this policy has been overlooked at least gives the impression that no real change was ever going to occur.
The Editorial Board calls for SMU to review this policy and allow financial aid to be based on the number of hours transfer students transfer in with, so that aid can be limited to the number of semesters necessary for students to get a full four years of education. We feel that until this policy is redone, transfer students will not feel at home on the Hilltop.
