Umich, UCL or Rochester

Alexandre
Sat, 18 Apr 2015 08:50:33 +0000

Traveller21, if your options were lower down the academic pool, I do not think you would be getting much static. But all three universities are truly exceptional. One’s undergraduate education is very special, and freshman year is an essential and irreplaceable part of that experience. I am afraid that with your overriding desire to transfer, you will not capitalize on that special experience and once you transfer, will not have the freshman experience at your other university either.

You should also remember that the Ivy League (plus MIT and Stanford) are harder to transfer into than they are to get into as a freshman, so do not quite on it.

For example:

Harvard: 1,432 applied, 13 (less than 1%) were admitted
MIT: 497 applied, 21 (4%) were admitted
Princeton: Has not admitted transfers since the 1980s
Stanford: 1,764 applied, 33 (2%) were admitted
Yale: 1,091 applied, 36 (3%) were admitted

Beyond those, you aren’t really upgrading the quality of the institution, particularly in a major such as Engineering, which Michigan excels at, but if you insist on an Ivy League, here you go.

Brown: 1,785 applied, 88 (5%) were admitted
Columbia: Over 2,500 applied, 150 (6%) were admitted
Cornell: 3,880 applied 773 (20%) were admitted (but in the case of Cornell, the acceptance rate for endowed colleges (like CAS, Engineering and Architecture) is much lower, probably under 10%.
Dartmouth: 679 applied, 19 (3%) were admitted
Penn: 2,453 applied, 212 (9%) were admitted

http://oir.harvard.edu/files/huoir/files/harvard_cds_2013-14.pdf (section D)
http://web.mit.edu/ir/cds/2014/d.html (section D)
http://ucomm.stanford.edu/cds/2014#transfer (section D)
http://oir.yale.edu/sites/default/files/CDS2014_2015.pdf (section D)
http://brown.edu/about/administration/institutional-research/sites/brown.edu.about.administration.institutional-research/files/uploads/CDS_2014-2015_0.pdf (section D)
https://undergrad.admissions.columbia.edu/ask/faq/topic/393
https://dpb.cornell.edu/documents/1000563.pdf (section D)
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~oir/pdfs/cds_2014_2015.pdf (section D)
http://www.upenn.edu/ir/Common%20Data%20Set/UPenn%20Common%20Data%20Set%202014-15.pdf (section D)

The odds are not good, regardless. I would recommend going for Michigan or Rochester, make the most of your first year (academically and socially), and if after your Freshman year, you still feel like transferring, apply during your Sophomore year in order to transfer for your Junior and Senior years. Both Michigan and Rochester have flexible curricula, so you should have no trouble switching majors if you so wish.