In this case study, we use the Postsecondary Data Partnership dashboards to better understand the profile of transfer-in students and their short-term and long-term outcomes.
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In this case study, we use the Postsecondary Data Partnership dashboards to better understand the profile of transfer-in students and their short-term and long-term outcomes.
By exploring the institution's Retention and Persistence PDP dashboard, Thomas, our institution’s provost, notices that the transfer-in student population’s retention rate has declined nearly 12 percentage points between 2012-13 and 2017-18.
He takes these data to the President and secures funding to start a transfer student success program in hopes of reversing this trend.
He recruits Angela, the Director of Academic Advising, to lead this new initiative and asks her for recommendations on ways to better support transfer-in students.
Angela is excited about leading this new program, but before she can make recommendations, she needs more information like:
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- How many students transfer to our institution each term?
- Are most transfer-in students ready for college-level courses?
- How many credits do transfer-in students earn per year?
- And what percentage of transfer-in students complete a credential within three years of enrolling at our institution?
Because Angela has reviewed the training materials for the Postsecondary Data Partnership and has access to the institution's dashboards, she feels confident that she can find the answers to her questions. Let’s follow along as she explores the dashboards.
Angela’s first question is, “How many transfer-in students enroll in our institution each term?”
The enrollment dashboard can answer this question. Navigating to that dashboard, Angela sees that her institution enrolled over 4,600 students in 2022-23. Of those, 1,580 are new transfer-in students.
To better understand this population, Angela needs to filter the dashboard to only report transfer-in students. To do that, she filters the enrollment type filter in the dashboard settings to "transfer-in".
Now this dashboard only shows transfer-in students. Because she will be developing new programs, she needs to understand in which term most transfer-in students enroll. To answer that question, she needs to add the cohort term dimension to the dashboard. To do that, she clicks "edit", which opens chart settings. She selects "cohort term" from the dimension dropdown. Then clicks "apply settings".
Now there is a line representing the number of students transferring in during the fall, spring and summer terms. Our largest cohort enters in the fall and for the most recent cohort, that was 70% of the total cohort. 22% of the total cohort transferred in during the Spring and the remaining 8% of the total cohort transferred in summer.
Now Angela is ready to explore her second question which is what percentage of transfer-in students complete a credential within 3 years of enrolling at our Institution? This is the outcomes dashboard filtered to transfer-in students. Because she is interested in three-year outcomes, she used chart settings to remove the two most recent cohorts from the report and she changes the outcomes time frame to 3 years.
Now we're ready to review the results. Scrolling down to the part to whole chart, she sees that of the 2019-20 transfer-in student cohort, 43.3% are still enrolled at their Institution and 22.6% earned a bachelor's degree at their institution. She also learned that 19.6% are no longer enrolled in any college and left without earning a credential. The remaining 14.4% transferred out of their institution prior to completing a credential. Of those, 5.7% are enrolled at a 4-year institution and 3.4% are enrolled at a 2-year Institution, 3.1% earned a bachelor's degree at another 4-year institution and 2.2% earned an associate degree at another 2-year institution.
Now Angela is ready to explore her next question which is of students who transferred in, how many transfer out within 2 years without earning a credential?
Angela navigates to the transfer institution level dashboard to answer that question. Before she looks at the charts, she filters to only include transfer-in students. There are three unique filters in this dashboard. Because she's interested in students who transferred into their institution then transferred out relatively quickly, she leaves the transferred within setting to 0 to 2 years. The destination institution type filters students who transfer to two or 4-year institutions. Since Angela is interested in all destination institutions, she will leave that set to all institutions. And because Angela wants to understand the behavior of all her transfer students regardless of the number of credits they've earned, she's going to leave the earned credit milestone set to all. Now she's ready to review the results.
Scrolling down to the stacked bar chart, she focuses her attention on the two most recent cohorts. In both years, 96% of students who transferred out within 2 years of entering their institution did not earn a credential. First that's nearly 1,000 students.
Angela is ready to explore her next question. How many credits do transfer-in students earn per year?
Angela navigates to the credit completion ratio institution level dashboard to answer that question. Before she looks at the charts, she filters to only include transfer-in students.
This is the credit completion ratio dashboard filtered to transfer-in students. Hovering over the 2022-23 data point, she finds that the transfer-in student credit completion ratio is 86.7%. On average, they attempted 21.6 credit hours during that academic year and completed 19.3 credit hours.
Angela has gathered a lot of information about her institution's transfer-in students and she's ready to summarize what she's learned.
- Her institution enrolled nearly 1,600 transfer in students during the 2022-23 academic year.
- Of those, 70% entered in the fall term, 22% entered in the spring and 8% entered in the summer.
- 3 years after enrolling, 43% of the 2019-20 cohort are still enrolled, 23% have earned a bachelor's degree at their institution, 14% have transferred out of their institution and 20% are no longer enrolled at a college or university.
- For the more recent cohorts, Angela found that nearly 1,000 newly transferred in students subsequently transferred out without receiving a credential first, but transfer-in students are completing credits.
- She found that the average transfer-in student completed nearly 90% of the credits they attempt.
Angela drafts the following recommendations and shares them with the Provost.
- Programs must be fully staffed in Fall to support the large influx of transfer-in students, but staffing can be reduced in Spring and Summer.
- She would like to develop a peer mentoring program that would connect prior transfer-in students with current transfer-in students to help them connect to the institution.
- She would also like to start a 30 to finish campaign to encourage transfer-in students to accumulate at least 30 credits per year for on-time completion.
- She would like to reach out to transfer students who have left college without completing a credential to discuss options for them to re-enroll.
- And she would like to reach out to prior transfer-in students who have transferred out to determine if they could finish a credential at this institution using reverse transfer.
In summary, Angela was able to learn a wealth of information about transfer-in students by accessing her institution's PDP dashboards. Qhat other information could Angela explore and how could she use that information to better support Student Success?