You might assume that the vast majority of students take the traditional route to college. After high school graduation, they head off to a four-year state university or private college.
Most students don’t take that direct route. Many students start at community colleges with the aim of finishing at a four-year institution. Still others start at a four-year college, but something goes wrong and they end up transferring to another four-year institution.
Even among students who begin at a four-year public or private institution, roughly a third of students transfer. That’s a shocking reality.
With so many college students ultimately transferring, I wanted to share a resource that will enable your clients to see how many transfer students a particular institution accepts. After all, there is no use dreaming about transferring to a specific college if it accepts few, if any, students beyond the freshmen year.
You can find this transfer resource at Higher Ed Data Stories, which is the website of Jon Boeckenstedt, a respected higher-ed observer and a vice provost at Oregon State University.
The acceptance rates for transfer students are wildly different among schools. Here are examples:
Berkeley vs. Caltech
The percentage of undergrads who were transfer students in 2020 at the University of California, Berkeley was 29% versus less than 2% for the California Institute of Technology.
Boston University vs. Boston College
The percentage of undergrads that were transfer students at Boston University was 24% versus 5% at Boston College.
A look at the transfer tool
Here is a snapshot of what the results, using the transfer tool, look like. These are partial results when I explored doctoral universities on the East Coast (what the tool defined as Mid East).
Figure 1: Transfer Students at Doctoral Universities in the Mid East
Source: Higher Ed Data Stories
Using the transfer tool
You can dictate what region of the country and the type of higher-ed institutions that you want to explore with the resource.
Here are the tool’s higher-ed institution categories:
- All
- Doctoral
- Master’s
- Baccalaureate
- Associates
- Other
Here are the regional choices:
- All
- New England
- Mid East
- South Central
- Southeast
- Great Lakes
- Plains
- Rocky Mountains
- Southwest
- Far East
Being realistic with transfer chances
It’s important that families remain realistic regarding their transfer chances. And that’s true whether a child’s original school doesn’t work out or if a student starts at a four-year college with the intention of going to a more selective one after one or two years. By the way, that latter strategy is not advisable.
Obviously, transferring is necessary if a student, with the aim of earning a bachelor’s degree, starts at a community college. It’s best, however, to avoid transferring from one four-year college to another because inevitably, a transferring student will lose academic credit hours.
According to a General Accounting Office (GAO) report, students lost an estimated 43% of college credits when they transferred, or an estimated 13 credits. The average credits lost during transfer is equivalent to about four courses, which is almost one semester of full-time enrollment.
To keep academic credit loss to a minimum, families should talk to a college’s transfer credit evaluator to get a sense of what credits would transfer. A student should ask for an evaluation of credits before making a transfer decision.
Years ago, a family friend’s daughter, on a lark, decided over a Christmas break to New York City, that she wanted to transfer to New York University. The NYU paperwork was easy and after Christmas break, she started her spring semester at NYU.
Only after she was attending NYU did she discover that many of her academic credits from the University of San Francisco did not transfer! After that one ill-fated semester in New York, she transferred back to the California school.
It really pays for families to do their homework before a student transfers!