How Successful Are Transfer Students ?
It's Getting Hard to Tell  (Community College Week, March 20, 2000, Vol. 12, No. 16)
By Pamela R. Weiger

Kirkwood Mo.— When 23-year-old Andrea Taylor finished high school six years ago, she entered Bradley University in Peoria, Ill. as a freshman. After a year, she left the university and returned here to her home, where she began taking classes at St. Louis Community College at Meramec.

“I knew I needed some type of schooling, and my parents were paying for it,” Taylor said. “But I didn’t want to waste their money since I didn’t know what I wanted to do.”

For the next five years, Taylor toiled away at school while working full time. Last year, just shy of an associate’s degree, she transferred 65 credit hours to Webster University, where she is majoring in education with the hopes of graduating in May of 2002.

Believe it or not, her migrations back and forth between the two-year and four-year academic worlds make her a fairly typical modern college transfer student.

But the blurring line between a transfer student and a so-called native four-year student — one who started his or her academic career at a four-year school — makes it increasingly difficult to assess how successful transfer students are in getting a bachelor’s.

“This transferring back and forth has been going on for 50 years, but studies indicate that it is becoming more and more of a phenomenon,” said Dr. Gustavo Mellander, director of the National Center for Community College Education at George Mason University, a four-year institution that receives more community college transfer students than incoming freshman.

“A lot of students go to community college in the summer to take courses at a cheaper rate and then transfer back” to universities, Mellander said. “The cross pollination makes it difficult to measure.”

Still, some researchers are giving it a shot. Dr. Wynetta Lee, a specialist in adult and community college education at North Carolina State University, has conducted a yet-to-be published survey to assess how likely community college students are to earn a bachelor’s degree.

Based on her preliminary findings, she said, the rates are not as high as they should be. She and her colleagues were recently awarded a grant from the College Board to study the attrition rate of community college transfer students at four-year institutions.

Lee’s study is based on data indicating that during a given year, six percent of the graduates at four-year institutions were previously community college students.

She admitted the data may be misleading. But, she said, “The bottom line is, not enough [transfer students] finish, or finish fast enough.”

Other researchers have come up with contrasting findings.

Dr. Dorothy Horrell, president of the Colorado Community College and Occupational Education System, conducted a five-year statistical analysis of the success rate of transfer students as part of her Ph.D. dissertation. She analyzed 1989-1990 data involving students who had completed an associate’s degree at a state community college and transferred to one of three universities to find out if those students persisted and performed at the same level as entering freshman.

“There was no statistically significant difference,” Horrell said. “Community college students did as well as or better than native students.”

In fact, the transfer students in Horrell’s analysis had significantly higher grade point averages than their counterparts. The native students graduated at a higher rate, but Horrell attributes that to the longer length of time it took the transfer students to earn their degrees. A higher percentage of nongraduating transfer students were still enrolled at the time of the survey.

Many individual college studies have also shown that while transfer students may take longer to graduate, their rate of graduation is not significantly lower than that of their counterparts who begin their education as freshmen at four-year schools.

At the University of California at Davis, a full 80 percent of community college transfer students earn baccalaureate degrees, just barely fewer than the 80.2 percent of students who enter the university as freshmen.

Statistics from the University of California at San Diego show that graduation rates for transfer students there average around 75 percent — almost as good as the 79 percent graduation rate of students who enter the school as freshmen.

These transfer success stories and others like them can be attributed to four-year schools’ efforts to smooth the transition for transfer students.

At the University of Washington, where almost half of the biology majors receive their introduction to the subject at area community colleges, instructors at both institutions work together to develop course standards and laboratory exercises for two-year biology students.

A similar effort takes place at Oklahoma State University, which works closely with eight regional community colleges that send transfer students to biology degree programs at the university.

In Colorado, community colleges have articulation guarantee transfer agreements with all of the state’s public four-year institutions. The link is so closely established between Red Rock Community College and the Colorado School of Mines, for example, that community college students can take an introductory engineering course at the School of Mines campus and pay the community college tuition rate.

But however successful such programs appear, the tactic of mixing and matching of two- and four-year school programs only deepens the ambiguity of statistics about how well transfer students do.

“If you just look at those who earn an associate’s degree, it doesn’t give the whole picture,” said Dr. David Pierce, president of the American Association of Community Colleges. “There’s no concept of ‘freshman’ and ‘sophomore,’ so the transfer rate numbers aren’t accurate.”

Pierce said that’s due in part to students “starting and stopping and starting again,” stretching the definition of a transfer student even further.

Dr. Arthur Cohen, a professor of higher education at the University of California at Los Angeles and the executive director of the ERIC Clearinghouse for Community Colleges, said part of the problem lies in how most  research on transfer success rates is conducted.

While he has seen data from various systems indicating that it takes transfer students a little longer to graduate than native students, Cohen said, the “numbers are really sloppy.”

Most studies, he said, are baccalaureate retrospectives that look at bachelor degree transcripts and attempt to determine how many have community college experience.

“This question has been around forever, and it all depends on how you define the issue,” Cohen said. “There is no national data worth very much.”