<ol>
<li><p>The son of a friend, who was a prospective Computer Science concentrator, strongly disliked his first year at Harvard, and was accepted at Stanford as a transfer. He never actually showed up there, however. He took a job at Facebook for the summer, and never left; that was three years ago.</p></li>
<li><p>I forget his screen name, but there was a very active poster on CC who left Harvard last year after his first year, very disappointed with the quality of his classes and classmates. He was planning to travel for a year and apply to transfer in this cohort; I don’t know what has happened with him.</p></li>
<li><p>Years ago, I had three friends (or two friends and a friend-of-a-friend) who left Yale after one or two years: </p></li>
</ol>
<p>An African-American man who was struggling academically and socially, and felt he needed to be in an environment where more than a handful of people looked like him (he had left his home community at 13 to go to a fancy boarding school on full scholarship). The last anyone I know heard, he was driving trucks in Texas, but that was years and years ago. (Unfortunately, his name is so common that Google and Facebook are useless for stalking him.) </p>
<p>A woman from Northern California who never felt comfortable with the weather and social mores on the East Coast. She transferred to Stanford (where she was much happier), and has spent most of her career as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Central Valley. </p>
<p>A woman from a blue-collar family in Detroit, who couldn’t stand the wealth and entitlement many of her classmates showed. She transferred to Michigan, and was much happier; she is a history professor at a state flagship.</p>
<p>Another friend “left” because her boyfriend murdered her, and her boyfriend left because he went to prison for the murder. There were also a couple of cases I heard about of divorcing parents who stopped paying for college, forcing the child to leave. If you have a population of 5-7,000 young adults, they are not always all going to be happy and healthy.</p>