One in three students transfers at least once, a study reported this week, and half of those who leave four-year institutions end up at community colleges. Across the country, personal, economic, and academic factors are multiplying the phenomenon of “reverse transfer.”
Garett S. Wolfe is one of those statistics. After graduating from high school, he enrolled at the University of Montana on a rodeo scholarship in 2005. In the two years that followed, he pursued two different majors—welding and health and human performance—but neither felt right. “I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do,” he says.
Friends of his were graduating with bachelor’s degrees and not finding work. He didn’t want the same thing to happen to him. So in 2007, he left the university.
A bull-riding enthusiast, he spent the next three years on the rodeo circuit. With a clearer vision of his future, he transferred to Walla Walla Community College, in Washington State, in 2010. He began studying civil-engineering technology, knowing that graduates of that program could work as design technicians, inspectors, and project engineers.
“Technical trades are just in more demand right now,” says Mr. Wolfe, who plans to graduate in June.
Transfer students from four-year universities are increasingly common, says Deb Shephard, president of Lake Area Technical Institute, in South Dakota. Almost a third of the students there came from another institution, with most transferring from a four-year university, often South Dakota State University, she says.
Some students head off to a university because that is what is expected of them, she says, but they soon realize that it’s not a good fit—that, for example, it doesn’t align with their career goals. “If a student decides that their passion is being a diesel technician,” she says, “they need to come to our institution instead.”
Over all, students show a growing recognition of the financial sense in seeking out less costly two-year programs tied to in-demand fields, she says. As tuition continues to rise at public four-year universities, students don’t want to gamble on a bachelor’s degree that may leave them in debt, with no job.
Lake Area officials keep track of job openings in various industries to ensure they are not over-enrolling students in certain programs. “The worst thing we can do is graduate a student who can’t find a job,” she says.
Of course, some students end up transferring from universities to community colleges because they were weak students to begin with, says Clifford Adelman, a senior associate at the Institute for Higher Education Policy who researches transfer patterns nationally. Maybe they had low grades in high school and should have started at a two-year college. Other students transfer for more personal reasons, like following a significant other. “It happens more than you think,” Mr. Adelman says.
Significant numbers of students at four-year universities also just “dip in” to two-year colleges, taking a course or two there while continuing to work toward a bachelor’s degree. And other students are in a perpetual “swirl,” taking courses at both two- and four-year institutions.
An agreement between the University of Texas at El Paso and El Paso Community College, for example, allows students to do that—and keep their financial aid—as long as they remain enrolled full time. Swirling is a growing trend, says Donna Ekal, associate provost for undergraduate studies at the University of Texas at El Paso. It is the responsibility of institutions to figure out how to respond to it, she says.
Regardless of the direction of transfer, modern students are just more mobile, Mr. Adelman says. “The attachment that students used to have with their institution,” he says, “is weaker today than ever before.”
