Far, far away in a little-known part of town is Schuyler House — a dormitory near downtown Ithaca that most upperclassmen have never even heard of. Housed in Schuyler is a contingent of students without a dining hall, whose neighbors are local Ithacans, and who trudge 20 minutes uphill every day to get to class. Unfortunately, these students are not upperclassmen, embracing the independent Collegetown lifestyle. Instead, these 110 students are some of the most marginalized of students at Cornell: transfers.

This fall, a little less than 600 transfer students matriculated at Cornell. These students were thrown into college life after most of their peers had already assimilated. Of course, for many transfers, leaving the college they initially enrolled in to come to Cornell was their own choice. But the University must make more of an effort to ensure that these students feel at home here. Providing an on-campus housing community for transfers must be a priority.

Transfer housing has been a cause for concern since 1999, when it was announced that the the Class of ’17 Hall Transfer Center would be demolished to make way for a new and improved West Campus. Transfer students were left out of the West Campus Initiative, however, as it was decided that transfers would be housed in six-person blocks spread throughout in other dorms across campus.

According to a study administered by the Committee on Transfer Affairs, 89.3 percent of students that resided in the Class of ’17 Hall Transfer Center said that having a transfer program where all transfers have the option of living together is “essential.” And while 88 percent of all transfers surveyed reported a "positive" first-year living experience, this number dropped to 36.7 percent when only those who matriculated after the hall was demolished were polled.

For a university that places such an emphasis on the first-year experience, this current housing situation for transfer students is a disgrace. Living on North Campus is formative for many Cornellians, since the insular community makes our large university feel like a smaller and more manageable place for freshmen. Understandably, dormitories on North are overcrowded, and housing all transfer students there is not an option. But creating a transfer student community on West Campus is viable.

Rather than scattering transfer students across North Campus, West Campus, in Collegetown and in Schuyler House, a dormitory or a portion of a dormitory on West Campus should serve as a transfer student program house. While campus housing may say that Schuyler was a step toward creating a community for transfer students, this simply is not the case: it is too far and isolated.

We are grateful that next year, Schuyler House will house non-transfer upperclassmen as opposed to just transfers. But we do not think that blocking small groups of transfer students together among other students goes far enough. We hope that as the University undergoes a massive restructuring, it will consider giving transfer students the community they deserve as new students — the same kind of community all other Cornellians had when they first arrived on the Hill as freshmen.