I'm actually in total agreement, but let me argue devil's advocate for a moment: * I've known people who bonded with lifelong friends during their first year i

I'm actually in total agreement, but let me argue devil's advocate for a moment: * I've known people who bonded with lifelong friends during their first year in the dorms together. When you've all been separated from your family for the first time and as a group are thrown together, often even sharing rooms, there's a very strong psychological bond that can form. I'm still in touch with my first UCSD roommate; we both were transferring in as juniors and they matched us up. But if they hadn't matched the two of us, I might not have bonded with anyone as well; I've long lost touch with rest of my first year "roommates" (we shared an apartment). * When you transfer in, you often need to take the special unique prerequisite classes for the new school. There were several classes I took as a junior with a lot of freshmen. * If you are talking about the option to get into a prestigious school, the people you meet there are potential connections that can accelerate your career at various points. The longer you go to the same university, the more of those connections you'll meet. I went to a UC, and it does rank in the top 20 (I think it even hit #7 recently in some report?), and so it's a great school, but it's not a prestigious school, so I don't know that it counts. I had the option to transfer to Berkeley instead (I was accepted), and in retrospect I probably should have, if only for the prestige. That said, I'm honestly not clear that university is an absolute requirement for success today, at least in software development. I'm not quite ready to tell people they shouldn't go, but neither would I tell them they should.