Last month I tried to tackle the concept of graduate enrollment and different approaches to achieve enrollment growth. Taking on a different population this month, I work to address transfer student enrollment. Unfortunately, my experience in higher education has been that transfer students are typically viewed as outliers amongst new students in a campus community.
With this context, to diversify enrollment streams so as not to be dependent on new first time undergraduate students, if institutions are going to work to enroll a meaningful population of transfer students, they deserve to be onboarded and transitioned to their new home institution with the utmost care and service. In many cases, transfer students are already arriving with a level of fragility as they are coming to a new institution with prior experiences – in many cases negative ones – hence the reason for the transfer to a new institution. That said, transfer students coming from a community college or two-year institution may not have had a negative experience, but still earned the right to be welcomed and valued. After all, the new home institution did admit them.
One frequent topic in higher education ties to student “swirl”. Students moving between multiple institutions in an effort to find a college match. Stopping or preventing student swirl begins with successful onboarding and transitional activities that also ties to degree planning. For instance, holding a separate transfer orientation as transfer students have particular interests and needs beyond that of a new first time in college student. My experience has been that transfer students are looking for more specific operational topics tied to credit equivalencies, financial aid, and work opportunities. They are more focused and less interested in the team building activities associated with new first time in college orientation. Matching them with other transfer students within orientation, who have walked in their shoes will, as an added side bonus, help cultivate friendships.
Once students have onboarded and classes have begun, ensuring the institution offers an infrastructure of support is critical for transfer student success. In my experience, I have seen dedicated transfer student spaces serve as a successful venue for community building. Ensuring the institution has dedicated transfer academic advising, as transfer students progress towards a degree, often involves additional levels of complexity tied to ensuring meeting core curriculum and specific major requirements. Of equal importance, institutions need to have support personnel in financial aid, student accounts/bursar, and registrar functions cross trained so more than one staff person can speak to transfer student questions. Having only one specialist in these areas leads to an institutional single point of failure and transfer student frustrations should the single specialist not be available.
Perhaps of greatest importance for ensuring transfer student enrollment pipelines is flexibility in the equivalency of courses and a streamlined process for the evaluation of transfer credits. Foundational to this work is the development of articulation agreements with two-year institutions either in proximity to the institution or from where an existing population of students currently matriculates. The development of these agreements serves as an opportunity for relationship building with two-year institutions. Essential to this is working to ensure flexibility of transfer credits. I have worked at institutions where transfer barriers were erected that sent inflexible messages to two-year institutions. At one institution, English served as a barrier as the academic department communicated a message that their English pedagogy was too unique to allow for transferability. At another institution, Math served as a barrier. Such barriers worked to force the institution to be more dependent on other sources of enrollment and sent messages to the broader community that were not altogether student friendly.
Similarly, in working to develop transfer equivalencies, the process by which transfer credits are evaluated is critical to the enrollment process. This may involve a systems implementation and workflows to streamline the process. It also requires clarity of core curriculum rules to speed transfer credit evaluation. Equally important is ensuring sufficient human infrastructure and clarity of process so prospective transfer students can receive course equivalency decisions in a time efficient manner. Developing an online transfer equivalency portal and evaluation process, while seemingly herculean in nature, is a critical investment if building a transfer enrollment pipeline is a priority.
Ultimately, given the looming demographic cliff receiving much press, working to develop alternate sources of enrollment revenue is essential to reducing over reliance on one enrollment population. With this in mind, working to cultivate transfer enrollment, while an investment, serves as an opportunity.
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