The Transfer Game (from the Saturday Wall Street Journal)

U Sphere will save you a little reading -- the guess is that a good chunk of our audience doesn't get The Wall Street Journal, and thus may have missed a piece that ran Saturday. The upshot: students who couldn't get into their first choice of university for this fall would like to transfer next fall.

So these kids are already working on application materials. They're spending their Freshman year at a school that they weren't 100% happy with getting the right extracurriculars so they could land at one that they, presumably, will be 100% happy with.

I'm all for transferring if it's not the right fit. And I have long been a proponent of the community college route for the right student as a precursor to college life.

But come on. Spending your Freshman year planning on transferring defeats the purpose of the Freshman year. Entirely.

I felt worst for one school -- The University of Tulsa. (It's on my list of "underrated.") They scored a prize recruit, who has already decided, while a Freshman at Tulsa, that he HAS to go to the University of Michigan.

Tulsa's too classy a place, and too good a school, to get dragged into some sort of mudslinging, so I hope (rather, I BET) that they'll find another deserving student to take the spot that will be open next year.