Hello world. As a junior in high school, I’m currently agonizing over my future.
In regards to career, I’m interested in going into biomedical engineering. Because finances are important, I’ve been considering attending Rutgers in NJ (since I can hopefully get a ton of AP credit from there), dual/triple major there, and then transfer to more prestigious colleges for masters and doctorate.
Assuming I do well in Rutgers, will it be possible to transfer credit from Rutgers to MIT or other prestigious colleges?
Yes, you can transfer to another college (typically to start your junior year in the new college). Many, if not most, of your course credits will transfer, depending on the colleges. If you plan to transfer, you need to make sure the courses you’ll be taking are transferable to the new college. The biggest issue generally isn’t about transfer credits. It’s about the additional difficulty of getting accepted as a transfer student. Elite colleges of MIT’s caliber accept very few transfer students. The most important factor for a transfer application is likely to be the LoRs from professors (at Rutgers, in your case), unlike a standard application. How enthusiastic these recommendations are will be critical.
MIT is very difficult to transfer into as an undergraduate student regardless of where you are transferring from.
I was a graduate student at a “top 3” university. There happened to be multiple other graduate students there who had done their bachelor’s degrees at Rutgers. They were all very strong students. If you do VERY well at Rutgers, then going on to a master’s degree at a top 3 or at least top 10 university is a very real possibility. This is significantly more likely to actually work rather than transferring. Also, this way you could potentially get both an affordable quality bachelor’s degree and a master’s as well.
By the way, we might only be disagreeing on terminology. If you complete your bachelor’s at Rutgers and then go to MIT or Stanford or Harvard for a master’s or a PhD, this is not called “transferring”. The very large majority of graduate students at top universities did not get their bachelor’s at the same school, but rather in general tend to have gotten their bachelor’s from a very large number of other schools. This is just a normal thing to do.
OP may be using the word “transfer” incorrectly. “Transferring” as an undergrad is a different thing than finishing an undergrad degree at Rutgets and then applying to MIT for graduate (masters, doctorate) school. One doesn’t “transfer” to grad school. It is a new application process.