<p>What do you mean by “top colleges”? I would think the prototypical Yale transfer would be someone who might have been accepted at Yale out of high school, but didn’t apply, or who WAS accepted, and in either case went to a good LAC and discovered after a time that the three linguistics courses it offered weren’t going to exhaust his interest in the subject. Or went to Deep Springs, and now has to go somewhere else. The military academies are perfectly consistent with that hypothesis. They do an excellent job of teaching some things and give others a wave of the hand, not to mention having a fair amount of baggage associated with being there. That’s not anything like someone transferring from Penn or Michigan.</p>
<p>I had a transfer-student roommate my senior year. He was someone who Yale had been recruiting for basketball, but he had chosen an athletic scholarship at Tulane. He had a falling out with the coach there, asked if Yale was still interested, and transferred. I imagine stuff like that still happens, too.</p>