Follow a 2 year institution as they use the transfer dashboard to learn when the best time is for students to transfer to increase the likelihood of student’s earning a credential from their institution.
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Ram who is the director of academic advising at a public 2-year institution has an initial meeting with Amy, a first-time, fall entering student who is interested in transferring to the state's flagship university. She wants to discuss if she should transfer in the upcoming Spring term or wait until next fall. Currently, Amy is enrolled in 12 credit hours and if she stays at this institution, she plans to take 15 credits in the spring and three credits in the summer for a total of 30 credits in her first year of college.
Ram has gotten similar requests from other students and knows that one of his institution's goals is to increase credential completion rates before and after transfer. So he decides to research the best time for students to transfer using Amy's question as a starting point.
He navigates to the transfer institution level dashboard to answer this question: what percentage of students who transfer out to a 4-year institution attain a bachelor's degree within 6 years?
Because Amy wants to transfer to a 4-year institution within the next year to complete her bachelor's, Ram leaves the transferred within filters set at greater than zero to 2 years, but changes the destination institution type to "four year". Looking at the line chart for the 2021-22 cohort, he sees that 3,429 students transferred to a 4-year institution within 2 years of entering their 2-year institution out of 32,206 students in that cohort.
Scrolling down to the part to whole chart, he checks to make sure that the cohort is set to 2016-17, which provides the six-year credential outcomes. Now he's ready to review the chart. Looking at the part to whole chart for the 2016-17 academic year, he notes that 66.1% of those students earned a bachelor's degree, 5.2% earned an associate degree, 1.2% earned a certificate while 27.5% have not yet earned a credential.
While that information is interesting, it doesn't help to know when the best time for students to transfer is. The next question he would like to answer is is there a difference in post transfer outcomes for students who accumulated more credits prior to transferring out compared to students who transferred with fewer credits?
He re-enters the transfer dashboard to answer that question this dashboard has another unique dashboard filter called the earned credit milestone. That filter can help Ram understand the outcomes of students who have earned different credit amounts prior to transferring out of their institution. First, he changes the filter to show students who had transferred out of their institution after earning more than six credits up to 12 credits.
Now the reporting updates. Scrolling down to the part to whole chart, he sees that 58.2% of the 2016-17 cohort completed a bachelor's degree within six years of first entering their institution.
Next, Ram changes the earned credit milestone filter to show students who had transferred out after having earned more than 12 credits up to 24 credits and finds that 60.7% had earned a bachelor's degree 6 years after entering their institution.
And finally, Ram changes the earned credit milestone filter to show students who had transferred out after having earned more than 24 credits to 30 credits and finds that 64.5% had earned a bachelor's degree six years after entering their institution.
Based on past student performance, if Amy continues through the summer and earns 30 credits prior to transferring, she is more likely to earn a bachelor's degree.
Ram asks his marketing department to create content around the benefits of waiting to transfer until key milestones are achieved so he can provide it to students. He also drafts a report and sends it to Elise, the institutions Provost, showing that a higher percentage of students with more earned credits prior to transfer, earn a bachelor's degree compared to those who transfer with lower amounts of credit. He hopes this will bring recognition to the institution of their overall impact on Student Success and degree completion.