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The Growing Importance of 2/4 Transfer
Understanding Transfer Performance
For many years, data problems complicated efforts to document transfer performance
because institutions were not able to track students after they left their institutions. An
elusive search for a single measure of transfer further compounded efforts to document
transfer effectiveness. In the last decade, however, improvements in national as well as
state data have provided useful information about student flow patterns and the attributes
of students most likely to succeed in 2/4 transfer. Nationwide, roughly a third of all first-
time, degree-seeking students transfer at least once within four years after initial
enrollment—about one in four students who begin at four-year institutions and 43% of
students who begin at two-year institutions. Approximately half of the transfer students
who initially enroll at two-year institutions go on to four-year institutions. Nationwide,
about 70% of students who transfer from two- to four-year colleges after taking at least a
semester’s worth of credits graduate with a baccalaureate degree. Not surprisingly,
students who are most successful in 2/4 transfer have similar attributes to those who are
successful in four-year institutions: they have rigorous academic preparation in high
school, they enroll full-time, and they do not take time off en route to the degree.
A Look at State Policy and 2/4 Transfer in Six States
Although we now know more about student flow patterns in 2/4 transfer, there has been
little research concerning the role, if any, of state policy in influencing 2/4 transfer
performance. To address this, six states were selected for intensive study about 2/4
transfer and state policy. The states selected rely heavily on transfer from two-year
colleges as a point of access to the baccalaureate degree for low-income students. The
criteria for selection also included the states’ grades on completion in Measuring Up
2000, the state-by-state report card for higher education released by the National Center
for Public Policy and Higher Education (2000). Three of the six states selected received
high grades on retention and degree completion in Measuring Up 2000, and three
received low grades. The high-performing states are Florida, New York, and North
Carolina; Arkansas, New Mexico, and Texas received low grades. This paper describes
how each of these states uses state policy to affect transfer performance, looking at
several dimensions of state policy: governance, enrollment planning, academic policies
affecting transfer, and data collection and accountability.
The research is most telling concerning what’s missing in state approaches to transfer
policies. None of the six states uses all of the tools of state policy to energize transfer.
Transfer is routinely included as one of many priorities for the community colleges, but
no state has set clear goals for 2/4 transfer performance for all institutions or for the state
as a whole. The accountability structures typically focus on two-year college transfer
performance instead of also looking at the responsibilities of the four-year institutions.
The accountability mechanisms that are in place in the four-year institutions may actually
work against the transfer priority, such as the requirement to report five-year retention
and graduation rates. Since community college students rarely complete the baccalaureate
degree in five years, this measure discourages four-year institutions from serving transfer
students, particularly if they are funded on the basis of degree performance. Most of the
states confine transfer reporting to public institutions, leaving out the important role
played by the private sector in accepting students for transfer. Only one state, New York,
has a form of incentive funding for transfer, and it is available only to private institutions.
North Carolina plans to include incentive funding for transfer in performance funding for
public institutions, a plan that probably will be derailed because of state budget
difficulties. Beyond these slender examples, none of the states has mechanisms for
rewarding institutions that are high performers in transfer effectiveness. Texas alone
among the six states just recently established a small financial aid program designed to
reach transfer students; none of the other states uses financial aid to create student
incentives to start their education in a community college before transferring. None of the
states has focused on the equity aspects of transfer performance, either as a policy
priority or in its data reporting. Although the three high-performing states do a better job
than the others in retaining and graduating students of color, all the states have major
gaps among ethnic groups in retention to the baccalaureate degree.
Conclusions
The paper concludes with state policy recommendations for energizing 2/4 transfer:
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Transfer from a community college to a four-year institution is just one dimension of
student transfer, but it deserves priority attention from state policymakers for many
reasons. The baccalaureate degree is becoming the entry point to the workforce for the
majority of students, making it increasingly important that 2/4 transfer works well.
Several forces are converging to push more students to community colleges as their
initial point of access to postsecondary education: growth in the number of high school
graduates; demographic changes that are increasing the proportion of poor and minority
students; more stringent admissions requirements in many four-year institutions; and
rising college tuitions. Although progress has been made nationwide in closing
performance gaps among racial groups in the transition from high school to college, the
gaps widen again in baccalaureate completion. While the baccalaureate degree may not
be the best or only goal for all students, there is no public policy rationale for why it
should be a lesser goal for students of color than for white students. Improving the
effectiveness of 2/4 transfer will be the key to national progress in closing the gap among
racial groups in degree attainment—and it will affect far more students than affirmative
action policy.
The research shows that there is not much difference between the high-performing and
low-performing states in many of their basic approaches to transfer policy. All have paid
a good deal of attention to the academic policy aspects of transfer, and have comparable
policies in place concerning core curriculum, articulation agreements, transfer of credit,
and statewide transfer guides (including web-based catalogues). The key difference
between the three high-performing states and the others seems to lie in the statewide
governance structure for higher education. Arkansas, New Mexico, and Texas have
institutional governing structures, whereas Florida, New York, and North Carolina have
stronger statewide governance capacities. All three of the high-performing states also do
a better job of using data as a tool to improve transfer performance, including state-level
feedback to campuses about their performance relative to others.
