Good luck actually executing the transfer from state college to Ivy. I'm sure it is something that is possible, but I didn't know of anybody that actually did it in my four years. The very few transfers I knew of tended to be more lateral moves, or at best moving up from some of the "mini-Ivies", like Colby or Bowdoin.

Transferring credits between universities is also a huge crapshoot, as you never know whether school A will accept your classes at school B.

That's a classic "all or nothing" that the article complains about. The more obscure the major the less likely Yale is the top anyway. Say you want to go to the worlds best mining engineer school. Going to Yale or transferring to Yale is not an option.

There's also a classic misconception of assuming the general public is stupider than they actually are. I looked up the transfer policies and talked to guidance counselors and got approval to transfer courses before I took my first class... Everything turned out OK. Other than the whole switching majors three times, and even that turned out OK in the end.

If you want to go to the world's best school for mine engineering, Yale shouldn't be on your list to begin with. It's a sign-off for pedigreed elites, not a trade school.

Elite schools can actually teach practical things. Stanford was constituted as a school of Engineering, Agriculture and Business.

Stanford also confers more degrees in social sciences and "interdisciplinary studies" (i.e. degrees in having graduated from Stanford) than in engineering and computer science, and has done for some years now. I don't doubt you can obtain an excellent education in those fields at Stanford, but it's been a long time since that was what Stanford was for.

Princeton doesn't do transfers, Harvard/Yale have 1-2% transfer acceptance rates, etc.

When transfers are admitted every year to my school (usually just 5-10) there's a writeup in the school paper about them. Without fail they all a) were accepted here, but chose to go to a similar/competing school like Princeton and b) are exceptionally accomplished at a young age.

This shouldn't be taken as the typical situation at all, but I know of a guy who transferred from a CSU to Stanford (and went on to get his JD from a top law school). So it does happen.

In general, it might not quite be the case that it's (particularly) hard to transfer from a state school to an elite one. It's just the universe of people going to more democratic schools are distinct from those going to elite schools; in other words, if you took a random sampling of students who have no issues getting into top schools straight from high school and put them in community colleges for two years, they would have no issue transferring to a top school afterwards.

Stanford has a transfer acceptance rate of 2%, so good for him. As for your second point, that's likely true, but it'll still be much more difficult for them to transfer than to get in straight out of High School (and impossible at schools like Princeton).

Every transfer at Harvard I know of was admitted to Harvard, but just decided to go elsewhere before deciding Harvard was the right choice.

The most sensible option is community college for two years and then transferring to a state school.

Unfortunately there are a lot of places in the states where that's not practical. Many, many students from my high school tried this route. The local CC has an arrangement with UCLA, so if the student gets good grades in a specific curriculum, they are guaranteed admission to UCLA for their final two years of college.

In theory, that's great, but in practice the CC is underfunded and there aren't enough classes offered, so it takes 3, or even 4 years, to get into all the classes required for the transfer. Upon getting into UCLA they find their department won't accept some of their CC classes for credit because they weren't rigorous enough, or that they need some prereqs that weren't offered at the CC, and it will actually take 3 years at the UC campus to graduate. They enter the workforce 2 years after their peers who went straight to 4 year universities and the 3 years of CC is easily more expensive than the 1 year of UC tuition saved, especially considering they fed and housed themselves for 2 extra years. Their lifetime earnings drop or they have to retire later.

None of this is their fault, either: The CC eagerly offers the few students who successfully (and luckily) navigated the class scheduling and credit transferring bureaucracy as the mode, and a 17 year old kid -- likely the first in their family to attend college -- isn't equipped to evaluate those claims. After all, why would they distrust the CC? They're told they'll save money and graduate at the same time, with the same degree, as their friends who went straight to UCLA and there's no reason for them to doubt that.

While I'm sure many CCs are perfectly good places to spend the first 2 years of college, there are at least some tar pits out there. It's a real shame, too.

Agreed, that's what I did. The best thing is that in community college you can spend as much time as you want bouncing around and figuring out what you want in life, rather than being rushed to "get in, get out" like in a 4 year university. It's also much cheaper, and the quality of education for classes taken in the first two years (basic chemistry, history, literature, etc) is frequently on par with that at any 4 year university.

I went to a CC in manhattan then to SUNY at Buffalo. At the CC I studied calculus, physics, chemistry, linear algebra, diff equations. I still think the education I got at the CC was better. The teachers were certainly better teachers.

Yeah, the teachers at my CC were better I thought too, perhaps because they were there primarily to teach and not to research. That and the classes were so much smaller which is great.

transfer rates for the top schools are extremely low