Engineering community college transfer pathways through pre‐transfer programs

Abstract

Community college scholars and practitioners consistently seek ways to support vertical transfer from community colleges to four-year institutions. An emerging practice to streamline coursework transfer is the use of tailored, intrusive pre-transfer advising to increase information access for students still enrolled at the community college. In this article, we explore how one pre-transfer program-the Virginia Tech Network for Engineering Transfer Students (VT-NETS)-improved the transfer pathway in engineering through early integration programming and advising structures that help to streamline vertical transfer. Using a quasiexperimental design, we compare the experience of transfer students who participated in VT-NETS with transfer students that did not participate in the pretransfer program. Based on our findings, we make practical recommendations that may be useful to community colleges and university partners seeking to establish, improve, or scale up early-integration programs for prospective transfer students.

Understanding Decision Processes Related to Pathways of Community College Engineering Students

“…Her research further reveals that this credit loss affects transfer students through their entire engineering transfer pathway. Grote et al (2022) highlights the emerging and growing practice of tailored proactive advising to assist community college students intending to transfer to a four-year institution in accessing information and streamlining their coursework. Their findings showed that students felt that they were taking the right classes and moving towards a successful transfer.…”

“…These kinds of programs focus on assisting community college students when they arrive at their four-year institution. For example, prior work by Grote et al (2022) has highlighted the experiences of successful transfer students in navigating coursework transfer in engineering after they had participated in a pre-transfer program that provided students with scholarships, advising, cohort participation, and a study abroad opportunity. The research design compared these students to students who had also successfully transferred but who did not take part in a pre-transfer program.…”

“…Previous research on transfer students' experiences has primarily focused on students who have successfully made the transfer to a different institution (Grote et al, 2022;Chamely-Wiik et al, 2021). However, there exists a gap in understanding the experiences of engineering students engaged in pre-transfer programs at community colleges who did not ultimately transfer to the intended partner university.…”

Board 223: Broadening Participation in Engineering via the Transfer Student Pathway: Findings from an S-STEM-Enabled Partnership

“…As we fully describe in Grote et al [3], the VT-NETS program focused on a variety of pretransfer supports to help improve the transfer pathway within engineering. Rather than waiting for students to transfer to Virginia Tech, this program is an example of how a four-year institution can actively participate in the education process during students' time at a community college.…”

“…Recent research that is forthcoming in Grote et al [4] performed a network analysis to identify information pathways that enhance engineering students' accrual of transfer student capital [5] and other pathways fraught with information asymmetry [6]. We used semi-structured interviews with relevant faculty and staff to explore how engineering transfer students receive information about transfer of coursework.…”