2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This work-in-progress is part of an NSF grant focused on improving recruitment, persistence and graduation of students originating at two Hispanic-Serving California Community Colleges, and transferring to a highly selective, predominantly white, 4-year institution. This paper compares the success of transfer students versus first-time-first-year (FTFY) students at the 4-year institution using a novel, cross-institution data collaboration. Using this cross-institutional dataset, we are able to highlight metrics by which transfer students are relatively more successful than FTFY students.

For example, traditional measures such as time to degree do not fully reflect the success of transfer students. We have found that transfers perform as well or better than FTFY students when accounting for their time at community college and for their part-time enrollment status. In fact, transfer students who do transfer to this predominantly white, 4-year institution graduate at higher rates than FTFY students, although their time-to-degree is longer.

The metrics used in these studies were not available from the office of institutional research at our universities. To support this study we developed a cross-institutional dataset, and our own database system and secured multi-institutional agreements for this data-collaborative. We share our experiences with multi-institutional data-sharing, including privacy concerns.

Our goals for this effort are two-fold: 1) to evaluate the effectiveness of our admissions ranking system compared to their long-term success. And, 2) inform our 4-year institution during the process of a massive curriculum overhaul that is part of a quarter to semester conversion. As part of the semester conversion, the university is encouraging changes to promote transfer student success. Hence our efforts are timely for informing this process. Regarding the admissions ranking, we demonstrate that major-specific models predict persistence-to-graduation more accurately than college-wide models. Other investigations include the impact on progress associated with starting points in the curriculum, for the entering transfer students. We also examine curricular (prerequisite structures) and non-curricular (course offering capacities) barriers for timeline graduation of transfer students.