If you don't get into your dream college, consider re-applying as a transfer.

Remember that whether you get accepted is not a reflection of your worth or your talents and abilities but an accounting issue since colleges are a business. Sometimes they only have room for 1 chess champion or 1 bassoonist or 1 crew coxswain so timing is everything.

I spent about 30 minutes looking at various common data sets for Top Schools and was surprised that many of them are 2 to 3 times easier to get into as a transfer student. Let me just say some are worse and I'll get those out of the way. Harvard 1.23%, Princeton 1.66%, Yale 1.67%, Brown 3.53%, Stanford 3.88%, MIT 3.13%. Some are about the same. Duke 6%, Columbia 5%, Caltech 5%, UPenn 7%. But surprisingly many are super favorable.

Dartmouth -28% about 4 times easier

Cornell - 18%about 2 times easier

UCLA - 24% about 2.5 easier

USC - 27% about 2.5 easier

Vanderbilt - 35% about 5 times easier

WashU - 26% about 2 times easier

UVA - 40% about 2 times easier

University of Michigan 46% about 2 times easier

UC Santa Barbara - 51% about 2 times easier

UC San Diego - 56% about 2 times easier

UC Berkeley - 20.6% not quite 2 times easier

University of Notre Dame - 43% about 3 times easier

Boston University 54% about 3 times easier

Tufts - 28% about 2 times easier

NorthWestern - 15.5% about 2 times easier

Emory - 32% about 2 times easier

NYU - 41% about 4 times easier

Some schools like JHU, UChicago, Columbia, etc do not publish this data so you have to talk to their admissions office to get some idea. Some schools like CMU, Georgetown, Williams, Colby, etc have worse rates but I didn't include them here.

What I simply want to point out is that if the College Gates close on you the first time, knock again the next year or the year after and they will be more accomodating in many cases. For some of you, this will make sense and that's why I'm posting this.