<p>“These are anecdotal, so don’t take it as “official.””</p>
<p>I met every Harvard transfer between 1997 and 2002. There are a lot of intenationals, but most successful domestic transfers come from other excellent schools. Wellesley, Georgetown, Penn, MIT, Caltech, and Cornell are major feeders. At any of these schools, you need to be an extremely strong – close to straight-A – student to have good odds as a Harvard transfer. If you are coming from a lesser known school (like DePaul or Evergreen), you need to be a superstar in your class; from a CC, you need to be one of the top students the school has ever had.</p>
<p>Think of it this way. As an admissions officer, your job is to do what’s best for HARVARD, not to do the greatest good for the greatest number. To use an example from my transfer class, if you have a chance to poach a junior with a 4.0 in physics from MIT who now wants to study poetry, why not do so? The risk is nil, because the kid has proved herself in a demanding college environment, and the benefits are huge, because she’s going to kick butt at Harvard and beyond. (Indeed, that’s exactly what she did and is doing.)</p>