2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

How We Did It: Building a Two-Year Transfer Path One Practice at a Time

This paper discusses developing a systems approach to engineering-student transfer from community colleges to the state flagship. We approached transfer as an intricate web and designed tools, practices, and relationships to carefully guide students along the many strands rather than assuming they could navigate the complex system on their own.

Our state historically has high levels of employment in technical fields but low levels of post-secondary degree completion among residents. Our university, the state’s flagship, plays a key role in state workforce development, but degree completion for historically marginalized students is poor, particularly in engineering. For students starting in one of the state’s 13 community colleges, transfer leading to engineering graduation was rare.

About a decade ago, one member of this team left his community college job to begin recruiting and advising engineering students at the flagship. He immediately noted the low transfer rates and uncovered unfavorable admissions policies/requirements for community college students relative to native students. He connected with former two-year colleagues and leaders in the engineering-dean’s office to problem solve. One colleague, another team member, was a community college STEM dean in an HSI and passionate about transfer as a means to diversifying engineering. Meanwhile, a third team member became the project manager for a multi-year funded initiative to transform STEM transfer processes. We formed a statewide working group to address the challenges we found.

Concurrently, deans in the five metropolitan community colleges received a community-college specific NSF Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation grant to dismantle transfer barriers within the two-year system and enhance transfer student success statewide.

Through National Science Foundation support, we convened five universities, 15 two-year institutions, and the state higher education department to identify problems and solutions. Annual convenings over three years analyzed academic advising, transfer credit/admissions, policy, curricular learning outcomes, course transferability and degree applicability, communication, data, and financial aid, among others. Our team led the flagship to identify and strategize how to articulate engineering-specific courses unavailable in the community colleges. These efforts, supported by collaborators across the state, eventually resulted in more efficient transfer pathways; two- to four-year transfer agreements; and an Associate-in-Engineering-Science degree—all of which have further facilitated transfer in engineering.

With external funding, we recently initiated paid summer research internships in engineering so that two-year students can gain pre-professional experience early in their academic journey, thereby strengthening their vision of transfer as a path to an engineering degree.

Our systems approach helps students begin at community college and transfer seamlessly to any state public engineering program, and we are seeing success. Even as transfer numbers are stagnant or declining elsewhere across our campus, for fall 2024, our college enrolled the largest-ever cohort of in-state community college students and the second-largest overall transfer fall cohort. Since fall 2010, overall engineering transfer student enrollment has grown 152% (25% increase in the last 5 years). In-state community college recruitment has grown from less than 20 students in 2010, to over 75 in 2024.