Transferring to Hamline – myth vs. reality

Brianna Skildum, Columnist

When a student is looking to transfer to Hamline, they can go to the school’s website, scroll over to the admissions tab, click on ‘Transfer’ and read about all of the resources and tools available to them. “At Hamline you will join a diverse group of scholars driven by curiosity and collaboration. Nearly 30% of last year’s graduates transferred from two- or four-year colleges or universities,” states the first paragraph on the page.

One thing I notice right away is that they don’t tell you how long it took those transfer students to graduate, just that they were part of last year’s graduating class. What they actually say about their ‘Two-Year Assurance’ is even more interesting – “Hamline offers a two-year assurance of graduation for students with Associate of Arts degrees from regionally accredited colleges and universities. Hamline will provide students with the courses, faculty advising, and academic advising support necessary to complete a Bachelor of Arts degree within two years. To be eligible, students must have a minimum of 60 transferable credits. While at Hamline, students must adhere to posted deadlines, minimum grade requirements, and minimum credit load requirements.”

This statement might seem like it applies to a lot of students who would be transferring to Hamline, because there are presumably more students in the College of Liberal Arts than there are in the School of Business or the School of Education. That could be true, because the College of Liberal Arts does have over fifty major areas of study that students would be able to transfer into. However, there are still those students who aren’t transferring into a major that’s in CLA, and so essentially, they get none of the same assurance that they are going to be supported in graduating within two years, given that they come in with junior standing.

As for any student transferring, there’s also the fact to consider that all of their credits might transfer, but not really. Hamline has this cute little thing called the Hamline Plan; it’s a list of requirements that Hamline students need to fulfill in order to graduate, on top of making sure they have 128 credits completed by graduation. The “Hamline Plan Requirements” consist of taking classes that fulfill one FYSem, one E, four Ws, two Os, one R, one M, two each of F, H, N and S, three Ds, one Q and one P. That totals out to twenty-four courses that a student has to take in order to fulfill those requirements. That would come out to being 96 credits out of the 128 that a student needs to graduate.

So, even if a student transfers here to Hamline with the sixty credits required to transfer and graduate within two years, they would still have to take at least six semesters’ worth of classes in order to fulfill all of the Hamline Plan Requirements. They’ll be able to use those classes towards their degree and those two years needed to finish it, sure, but we all know that even coming to Hamline right off the bat, students have to deliberately take the time to fulfill the Hamline plan, while also fulfilling classes for their major, because a lot of the time, those classes don’t have any mutuality.

Half of Hamline classes themselves don’t fulfill any of the Hamline Plan; I can’t imagine that specified classes at other colleges are going to be particularly discernable as to whether they are a diverse class, or a humanitarian one, or a fine art. This is how Hamline classes work when transferring out; none of the “Special Topics” classes transfer to any other schools, and only about three quarters of the more general, all-colleges-have-them courses transfer. If their credits don’t transfer out, I can’t image that very many credits will transfer in while also fulfilling the Hamline Plan. This makes it so students are not only forced to spend extra time and money getting their degree; they’re also forced to get it here, at Hamline. If they already transferred once, they aren’t going to be able to transfer again (not that anyone wants to have to transfer more than once anyways). Transfer students are the worst victims of the Hamline money vacuum; there’s even a lawsuit against them for that very reason. A student transferred here to Hamline, and is now over 80,000 dollars in debt, with no degree to show for it. To be fair, he personally blames the case on racial discrimination, though Hamline denies any racial prejudice in his situation or others. This means that, in the least problematic scenario, the Hamline Plan failed him.