New Directions for
Institutional Research
John F. Ryan
Gloria Crisp
CO-EDITORS
Number 170
Jossey-Bass
San Francisco
Studying Transfer in Higher Education: New Approaches to Enduring and Emerging Topics
Xueli Wang (ed.)
New Directions for Institutional Research, no. 170
Co‐editors: John F. Ryan and Gloria Crisp
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THE ASSOCIATION FOR INSTITUTIONAL RESEARCH (AIR) is the world's largest professional association for institutional researchers. The organization provides educational resources, best practices, and professional development opportunities for more than 4,000 members. Its primary purpose is to support members in the process of collecting, analyzing, and converting data into information that supports decision making in higher education.
As a prominent part of postsecondary attendance patterns, transfer among institutions of higher education has generated perennial interest from scholars, institutional researchers, and policy makers. This volume provides updated scholarship on enduring topics in the literature and examines emerging issues pertaining to transfer. Despite the copious research devoted to transfer patterns and students who transfer, this line of research is thronged with conceptual, methodological, and data challenges that warrant continued and more nuanced attention. The nine chapters in this volume set out to offer fresh perspectives and approaches to answer this call.
The volume is organized around two broad, interconnected ways to conceptualize transfer. The first examines students who transfer and the second deals with transfer as a complex postsecondary pathway. Primarily centering on students, Chapters 1–3 are of particular use as institutional researchers seek to understand the nuanced experiences and success of the diverse and evolving transfer student population. Chapter 1 addresses how critical lenses can be used to understand today's transfer students, such as cultural capital, critical race theory, and community cultural wealth, in order to (re)conceptualize the framework of transfer student capital. Further challenging the deficit-oriented approach, Chapter 2 offers rich narratives of 15 community college men of color who successfully transferred to 4-year institutions. Chapter 3 focuses on an equally important but relatively new subpopulation, international transfer students, and provides national and specific institutional analyses of international transfer students’ experiences and enrollment trends in American colleges and universities. Intersecting both transfer students and transfer as a pathway, Chapter 4 delves into a new conceptual framework for studying transfer in STEM fields of study, an emerging national priority in broadening STEM participation. A validated survey instrument based on the conceptual framework is presented as a viable data-collection tool for institutional researchers and higher education scholars interested in similar topics.
Chapters 5–8 further explore transfer as a postsecondary pathway, bringing to light the increasingly complex and blurring ways in which transfer occurs. Institutional researchers may find these chapters illuminating in regard to how to measure and assess transfer pathways within the larger scheme of postsecondary completion. In Chapter 5, the authors document the controversial expansion of Applied Baccalaureate degrees through transfer agreements between community colleges and universities as well as through community colleges conferring their own baccalaureate degrees. Chapter 6 discusses the implications of new policies that facilitate the reverse transfer of credits for the purpose of conferring associate degrees to community college transfer students who are pursuing a baccalaureate degree. Drawing upon an analysis of institutional research data, Chapter 7 examines mixed attendance and transfer patterns of first-time degree-seeking students at a 4-year institution, and indicates that complex transfer patterns can be beneficial to the students as long as the transfer serves students’ educational goals effectively. Chapter 8 zeroes in on the varying selectivity of both the sending and receiving institutions of transfer students, and describes student flow among a national cohort of students who transferred to and from institutions of varying selectivity. The volume culminates with Chapter 9, a critical analysis of established and emerging lines of transfer research, based on which future directions for institutional research and higher education scholarship are put forward. Engaging empirical research, perspectives, and case analysis from higher education scholars and institutional researchers, this volume offers renewed conceptual and methodological insights that inform future research on transfer, along with concrete recommendations for institutional researchers.
Xueli Wang
Editor