2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This paper described a multi-year coordination between Community Colleges (CCs) to standardize course numbers, followed by collaboration with 4-year institutions to create transfer guides. The goal was to empower students to complete their associates and bachelors with less credit loss and begin at the 4-year institution at junior standing. The research questions and results focused on one 4-year institution’s publication of transfer guides and the subsequent trends of students starting at junior standing through descriptive statistics. The rational of focusing on this topic stemmed from authors of a new book on barriers community college students face when transferring to 4-year institutions. This book described how Texas legislation required public flagships to accept associate degree earners at junior level with limited success. This legislation aimed to shift power toward transfer students, but the fact remained that bachelor granting institutions were still being selective on which credits could count toward degree requirements. This lack of transparency and reliable information negatively impacted the pre-transfer advising process. This paper addressed the lack of literature on alternative ways to increase junior level standing within engineering, addressing the call for more selective universities to be more transparent and build a transfer-receptive culture.

Since the conversation on the national level often focused on Bachelor of Arts degrees, this research focused on a Research I, public flagship’s engineering program pre- and post- state intervention, aimed to increase community college transfer credit transparency. The state-wide intervention included aligning math, science and engineering curriculum and naming conventions at CCs to make it possible for bachelor granting institutions to have one transfer guide per major for all in-state CCs. The state then worked with the bachelor granting institutions to align curriculum to increase overlap among 4-year granting engineering programs. This alignment allowed 4-year programs to develop one transfer guide per major to increase transparency for transfer students and advisors to plot a path toward multiple state engineering programs. With transparency, we hypothesized the percentage of CC transfers entering at the junior level would increase.

At this one public flagship, there were 159 undergraduates who transferred into Aerospace, Civil or Mechanical Engineering majors who brought in-state CC credit from 2014 to 2024. These programs were the first to develop and publish transfer guides in 2022, mapping courses required for an associates in engineering and remaining courses at the 4-year institution. The results included the percentage of transfers by major who brought in CC credit and started as a junior. There was a slight increase when comparing pre- and post- transfer guide availability for these three majors, 74% and 82% respectively with an 8% increase. Allowing 6 semesters for transfers to graduate, there was a 92.2% graduation rate among students, which only included students enrolled prior to transfer guides. We also reported time to degree. Future work included examining other engineering majors at the same institution and potentially other 4-year engineering programs in the same state. It will be important to examine majors with less second year coursework offered at CCs.