Facilitating Transfer Student Success Through Better Measurement

Transfer students and their success have become a high priority for administrations in many colleges, universities and higher education systems, a welcome shift in institutional focus. Though transfer has long been central to the undergraduate experience for a large segment of learners in the United States, the myriad ways that transfer happens in practice can make it difficult to effectively track, aggregate and publish information useful to faculty, staff and, most importantly, students.

Unavailable, confusing or inconsistent information often poses major challenges for incoming transfer students. Although many institutions and college staff members endeavor arduously to facilitate transfer student success, widespread institutional opacity combined with a lack of publicly available data and metrics comparing transfer paths make the task of facilitating transfer much more difficult.

To try to address these issues at the City University of New York, the ACT project developed the Transfer Explorer (T-Rex) website. T-Rex makes transfer credit policies openly accessible and interpretable for every pair of CUNY’s 20 undergraduate colleges. First launched in 2020, T-Rex has since been expanded to provide degree requirement information and a platform for comparing credit transfer options across colleges and programs, among other features. It has now had close to 200,000 unique users. T-Rex has proven to be such a useful and successful model that it has inspired the development of a national version of Transfer Explorer, which will be hosted by not-for-profit Ithaka and go live later this year with data from an inaugural set of institutions from four states.

However, providing students and transfer professionals with accurate, transparent planning tools concerning credit transfer is only one part of the puzzle. Transfer-related data is often highly complex (for example, CUNY has over 1.5 million course transfer rules), and often most student outcome data is only accessible to administrators within each individual institution. To wrap one’s head around the overall implications of a college’s transfer policies, including in terms of transfer students’ success, quantitative metrics serve a very important role.

Measures relevant to transfer student success can be calculated by individual institutions that receive transfer students and those that send transfer students and by consortia of both types of institutions, including university systems. Many measures of transfer student success are calculable with institutional data and may provide important insight into the quality of an institution’s transfer student–related policies and environment.

Here are some examples: What percentage of transfer students re-enroll after their first semester? How do transfer students’ GPAs change in their first post-transfer semester? What percentage of vertical transfer students graduate within three years? What percentage of transferred credits are accepted and how many credits on average count toward transfer students’ intended majors? And how do all these outcomes vary by major? Such metrics, especially when measured across years, offer institutions opportunities to identify areas where progress has been or where improvements could be made.

New transfer students are not served when they unexpectedly find prior credits are not accepted by their destination institution, or when they find they are unable to enroll in courses counting toward their major. Such diversions to academic progress can lead to an early exhaustion of financial aid, imperiling degree completion. Transparency by means of relevant metrics may help institutions better enable positive outcomes and decision-making by current and potential transfer students.

Rethinking Measures of Transfer Student Success

Institutions, including those receiving transfer students, can use several standard measures of student success, such as retention and graduation rates. However, these measures are often calculated excluding transfer students. Although first-time, incoming students do offer a more homogeneous sample for such measures, the exclusion of transfer students from these metrics hides important aspects of a higher education institution’s practices and quality. Not including transfer students in these metrics also puts transfer students’ well-being and success at risk—they may be overlooked as institutions race to optimize the measures that feed into rankings or prioritized reporting requirements.

Calculating student success metrics with all students, as well as separately for transfer students, and making that information public can provide valuable information for students considering enrollment, but also for institutions as they attempt to improve their outcomes across their entire study body. Historically, CUNY has made transfer student success information publicly available within its performance management metrics and student data books.

Nationally, since 2017, institutional student success measures gathered and published by Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System have included award completion rates (undergraduate degrees or certificates) for transfer students. However, these statistics are not considered graduation rates and are instead found in the Outcome Measures IPEDS component. We encourage the outcome measures to be more widely considered and disseminated, as they represent important information for students considering transfer to an institution.

Another set of measures, the median times between a student’s application, acceptance or commitment to attend and that student’s credit transfer evaluation, are measures that also can be made public, as they are in CUNY T-Rex. These measures are important considerations for students, because registration choices may depend on how and when prior coursework transfers.

Institutions that send transfer students, oftentimes community colleges, may lack the resources and staff capacity to comprehensively track students’ outcomes following exit from the institution. However, most can obtain data from the National Student Clearinghouse concerning where their students subsequently enroll and graduate and other student outcomes.

Combining the college’s own administrative data with the National Student Clearinghouse results, measures can be used to answer questions such as: How do graduation rates of transfer-out students differ across destination institutions? What is the average time to degree among transfer-out students who subsequently graduate at each destination institution? What is the distribution of credits students are earning at the sending college prior to transfer? And how do these metrics differ across majors?

Knowledge of students’ frequent transfer destinations as well as success rates at the receiving colleges are potentially valuable for transfer advisers and administrators seeking to facilitate inter-institutional transfer pathways that lead to student success. Although every student differs and students’ fit with a receiving college or degree program can vary, receiving colleges may differ systematically in their receptivity and facilitation of transfer students. Knowledge of past success rates can be used to help students make informed decisions most likely to result in degrees and subsequent success.

As useful as National Student Clearinghouse data is, it comes with limitations. For example, it does not include information concerning how courses and credits transfer from one institution to another. Collaboration between institutions can enable the sharing of such data and of metrics that help to measure and compare institutions’ transfer friendliness. Data sharing across institutions that constitute common transfer pathways can enable more detailed analyses of how specific courses count toward a student’s major at the transfer destination.

Summarization of overall outcomes related to course transfer also enables identification of transfer-favorable institutions and institutional paths. For example, the average number of transferred credits not accepted and the number of credits accepted that are counted only as blanket electives are relevant to understanding how favorable a receiving institution’s transfer policies are in respect to another institution.

Data sharing across institutions need not necessarily require the transmission of identifiable student-level data. Instead of relying on many individual institutional websites, often with outdated and confusing course equivalency policy information, platforms like T-Rex seek to aggregate and make transparent course equivalencies in a multi-institutional space.

Almost Every Institution Is a Receiving and a Sending Institution

Most bachelor’s degree institutions are used to thinking of themselves as transfer recipients. Most community colleges are used to thinking of themselves as sending institutions. However, the vast majority of colleges, regardless of sector, function to some extent as both sending and receiving colleges. Within the CUNY system, traditional vertical transfer from community colleges to bachelor’s degree institutions represents a plurality, but not a majority, of credits transferred; the remainder consist of credits transferred from and to every type of CUNY college.

It is thus worthwhile for institutions to consider, regardless of sector, both how well they are doing at serving students who transfer in and how well they are preparing their students to transfer out.

Looking Forward

Within institutions, awareness of transfer students’ needs and success may be lacking. Metrics can provide valuable information, enabling better support and awareness of transfer students’ successes and challenges. Students themselves have much to consider when making transfer decisions and face incredible challenges, partially due to a lack of publicly available and relevant information. Platforms such as T-Rex seek to highlight transfer-supportive institutions and institutional paths, enabling students to make more informed choices and institutions to improve their support of these students.

Although declining enrollment continues to take a terrible toll on many higher education institutions, removing the structural and systemic obstacles faced by transfer students is a partial solution within reach and long overdue. With the calculation and dissemination of transfer-relevant metrics, individuals and institutions on their own, or in collaboration, have the power to measure, understand and begin to ameliorate at each institution the issues preventing transfer students’ success. Such transparency and accessibility would help to ensure that more students of all characteristics and backgrounds are enabled to make optimal decisions and successfully attain the degrees and futures that they seek.