Research & Tools

This report provides information to transfer partners aiming to develop data-sharing routines, and includes data guides that leaders and practitioners from community colleges and four-year universities can use to evaluate how well their institutions and partnerships are serving transfer students, identify areas of opportunity for improvement, and make the case to key stakeholders. The relationship between the University of Central Florida and Valencia College, and the nationally acclaimed DirectConnect to UCF® program, exemplifies how data and data-sharing can support better and more equitable outcomes for transfer students.

Transfer advising can be a powerful tool for supporting transfer student success and equity. By providing examples of successful practices and an interactive tool for transfer advising reform, this brief supports institutional leaders and practitioners in designing integrated transfer advising systems in partnership for higher and more equitable success among community college transfer students.

By exploring how enrollment managers and CFOs at four-year institutions view the role transfer students play in the overall picture of institutional health, this brief seeks to unearth insights about the incentives and opportunities for four-year institutions to pursue systemic improvements that have a real chance of achieving dramatically improved and more equitable outcomes for transfer students.

This guide provides an overview of the core elements of short-term improvement cycles, and includes tips and tools to help transfer partners use this approach to accelerate problem-solving for transfer student success.

The Transfer Opportunity Calculator provides institutions with data – including the financial return on investment and the quantity, success, and diversity of the transfer student pipeline – to assess the impact of increasing community college to four-year transfer student enrollment at select institutions. The tool is designed to assist senior leaders at four-year institutions—CFOs, enrollment managers, student success leaders, provosts, and more—in understanding how transfer can be a core strategy for achieving both equity and financial objectives, and uses evidence from ADVANCE, a transfer collaboration between George Mason University and Northern Virginia Community College, that simultaneously enrolls students at both institutions, to demonstrate impact.

This brief shares the process and outcomes of setting transfer goals in Minnesota, Texas, and Virginia. It includes a list of the transfer goals and sample reports to track progress on these goals.

Bachelor’s degree attainment in rural areas remains a challenge, despite local needs for bachelor’s education in the workforce. This brief investigates the transfer mission of rural community colleges as a means to increase bachelor’s degree attainment while minimizing the impacts of outmigration and promoting local workforce needs. It shares three case studies of rural transfer pathways that can help more rural students earn bachelor’s degrees connected to careers in their local communities.

Shanna Smith Jaggars and Marcos D. Rivera, researchers in the Office of Student Academic Success at The Ohio State University, joined a collaborative effort to identify strengths and areas of opportunities to improve supports for the nearly 3,500 internal and external transfer students who enter the university’s selective Columbus campus each year. In this brief, they share strategies that help clarify the alignment between transfer student success and commonly held faculty values of collegiality, fairness, and academic excellence.

Metro State University, founded to help working adults complete their Bachelor’s degree, remains focused on helping students apply as much credit for past coursework and experience as possible. This case study shines a light on noteworthy practices and elevates key lessons on serving transfer students well.

This brief summarizes the benefits and limitations of articulation agreements and offers new student-centered approaches colleges can take that move beyond articulation agreements to improve transfer student outcomes.

This paper seeks to understand what policies states have adopted to facilitate student transfer, improve credit applicability, and recognize student learning, and how these vary across states.

The Tackling Transfer Policy Advisory Board released a set of recommendations for systems change to improve transfer, with an emphasis on state, system, and federal policies, that dismantle inequitable transfer policies and build a new approach designed to center students and the recognition of their learning as they transfer across institutions.