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I've learned a lot about how transfers work--and don't work--from my own daughter's experience but also from an uptick in our own use of transfers here. I feel as if they should be far more common than they are, but it would take faculty embracing forms of commonality and overlap between institutions more forcefully than many of them do. It's not just people selling colleges and universities to prospective students who are prone to exaggerate and even invent differences between them--many faculty are intensely invested in the idea that their curricula are completely non-equivalent to other curricula until or unless we're in one of those narrow spaces where it's important to stress similarity and conjuncture instead.

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This is so good. The easy side looks really easy. The hard section is way too hard unless you have those college associations you discuss at the outset. The failure of the rating systems is reflected in the schools that are represented on the US Supreme Court. Maybe thinking of year one as a trial marriage would work better. One falls in love with a place and sticks or enters the “transfer portal” and tries again with a little more insight or experience. Hopefully, feeling it’s okay to exit a place. A year or so off after high school doing something functional might give still more clarity to what one will look for. Probably the best solutions lie in stuff you’ve set out in previous posts: ideas about big changes in college learning and admissions.

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