EDITOR’S NOTE: Op-Eds detail the views of their writers and are not representative of the stance of the paper. Publication of Op-Eds is not tantamount to an endorsement of their content.
The Transfer Hub, located in the basement level of Frese Hall at Queens College, opened in October 2025. Since its arrival, it has remained quite separated and mostly unknown from other campus support systems.
According to President Wu’s speech at the grand opening, he offers the Transfer Hub as a starring show of “our commitment to transfer student success and our duty to do everything that we can to support fully half of our enrollment here, which starts off at our sister institutions in the CUNY system.”
The Transfer Hub offers seemingly the same resources as the First-Year Experience (FYE): events, study locations and peer mentors for all first-year students. This raises questions on the existence of the Transfer Hub and what, if any, motive there was to not expand on the existing FYE resource.
FYE was established in Spring 2022 and according to their website: “Guides incoming students, both freshman and transfers alike, through programming and supports them in developing communities and finding their academic paths during their first year at Queens College.”
The allocation of funding for this hub also poses a question on what is to come for the already established FYE office. While the FYE office is located in Honors Hall room 5, it remains largely inaccessible for those who have difficulty using the stairs. Because the Transfer Hub is located at Frese Hall, which is a much more visible location on campus, it raises the idea that the FYE office should be merged with the Transfer Hub since the office is currently situated in an obscure part of the campus.
Nonetheless, having an additional resource could make it easier for students to get different types of support. According to research conducted by David Fischer at the Center for an Urban Future, “at the campus level, high student-to-advisor ratios — both before and after transfer — mean that students often struggle to access the one-on-one advising that is crucial for navigating the transfer process. Another key factor is what some college administrators call ‘transfer turmoil’: the jarring cultural adjustment of going from a highly supportive community college environment to a larger and less personalized senior college”.
It has been established – especially in a city filled with people who have a routine – that funding or revitalizing existing systems will likely be a better allocation of resources and more appreciated by current and future students.
The First Year / Transfer experience is vital to the City’s collective of fostering higher educated individuals, and their realization of such shows their knowledge of this importance:
“CUNY’s 2023-2030 Strategic Roadmap includes an explicit commitment to supporting transfer students,” according to a report from March 2024. “Internally, CUNY has moved to break through this institutional inertia by reorganizing internally to elevate the importance of transfer.
Additionally, the Transfer Explorer team has published campus-level data on transfer students’ outcomes, which is helping college administrators better understand the challenge. But more will need to be done to achieve significant improvements in transfer outcomes across the system.”
QC is following the goal of boosting and maintaining enrollment status amongst the newcomers in the CUNY system.
