2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This work, funded by the NSF S-STEM program, is based on a scholarship program for low-income students transferring from community colleges to complete engineering degrees at a regional four-year institution in the South. In addition to financial support, the student experience includes a first-semester seminar to develop community and familiarize students with campus resources. The students are also assigned faculty advisors in their degree program with specific expertise in mentoring transfer students. They meet with those advisors three times in a semester and are held accountable for engaging in student organizations, taking advantage of resources, editing resumes, and applying for opportunities. The program has been successful. Now in its final year, 90% of scholars have graduated or are on-track in their degree programs, and 91% of graduates have either obtained employment as engineers or entered graduate or professional degree programs.
Much work in the area of transfer student success has focused on initiatives to engage transfer students in programs to inculcate a sense of belonging in their new environment. At the institutional level, such efforts are often patterned after those that engage first-year students in university culture. The question addressed here is whether engineering transfer students perceive need for that institutional identity. With constraints on student time and university resources, are efforts better focused at the college level?
In our program, the cohort of scholars meets in a focus group at the end of the first semester to evaluate what has supported their success through the transfer experience. Last year, in response to a question regarding sense of belonging at the institution, a student stated “We don’t go to [Name of institution], we go to [Name of College of Engineering building].” The rest of the cohort agreed, and generally considered that sense of belonging to the College to be sufficient. This led us to revisit transfer student survey data from a previous year to evaluate trends in identity and belonging. In that survey, nearly twice as many respondents reported feeling connected to other students in the College than reported either a sense of connectedness to the University or a sense of belonging at the University. They also reported that the most important contributors to their academic success were the other students in their classes and their assigned engineering faculty advisors.
To further understand the relative importance of integration into a college of engineering and the sense of belonging at the larger educational institution, we convened four focus groups of transfer students, each group composed of students at a particular point in their educational journey, ranging from first-semester transfers to recent graduates. This work will report the students’ reflections on their progression from transfer toward degree completion, how they engaged within the college and with the greater university community, whether those were reasoned choices, and their perceptions of what role their integration played in their success. Outcomes will inform efforts in colleges of engineering as they strategize to best use of their resources to support the success of their transfer students, particularly those from financially disadvantaged backgrounds.