Guys if I wanted to transfer to an ivy such as Brown, Cornell, or Princeton, would attending a community college or state school (Penn State) for a year make my chances of admission better?
To transfer to those schools after only a year, you’d have to have been an extremely competitive student in high school to begin with. That being said, for an Ivy transferring from a state school would probably be better, but I think they tend to be more holistic with their transfer applicants. The real answer is, nobody knows what they’ll do.
What we do know though, is that Cornell accepts the most transfer students, followed by UPenn and then Columbia, so aim for those. Princeton only recently started accepting transfers again, but I don’t think we know the numbers or stats on those yet. The other Ivies mostly tend to accept transfers from other prestigious schools AFAIK.
Princeton is targeting community college transfers. Cornell’s transfer acceptance rate might be a bit of a red herring
due to the significant number of transferees holding a GTO.
Penn & Cornell alas accept the largest number of transfers in the Ivy League because they are the two largest undergraduate schools among the Ivies.