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Transfer Students Are Less Likely to Take Part in ‘High Impact’ Activities

By  Ben Terris
November 8, 2009

Not all transfer experiences are created equal.

So says the latest National Survey of Student Engagement, which for the first time compared data from students who had made “vertical” transfers, from community colleges to four-year institutions, and students who had made “horizontal” transfers, between four-year colleges.

“It’s important that we look at these two groups as distinct populations,” says Alexander C. McCormick, director of the survey. “After all, they change institutions for very different reasons and should therefore have different experiences.”

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Not all transfer experiences are created equal.

So says the latest National Survey of Student Engagement, which for the first time compared data from students who had made “vertical” transfers, from community colleges to four-year institutions, and students who had made “horizontal” transfers, between four-year colleges.

“It’s important that we look at these two groups as distinct populations,” says Alexander C. McCormick, director of the survey. “After all, they change institutions for very different reasons and should therefore have different experiences.”

The study, known as Nessie, found that both sets of transfer students tended to lag behind “native” students, as it calls those who did not transfer, in terms of campus engagement. But the horizontal-transfer students were likelier than their vertical-transfer counterparts to participate in “high impact” activities, like studying abroad, participating in internships, doing research with a faculty member, and partaking in a culminating senior experience, like a capstone course or senior seminar.

While 62 percent of native seniors said they participated in internships, for example, only 49 percent of horizontal-transfer students and 43 percent of vertical-transfer students could say the same. The biggest gap between the two populations of transfer students was found in study abroad, with only 7 percent of the vertical variety participating, compared with 15 percent of the horizontal. Twenty percent of the native students studied abroad.

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Although horizontal-transfer students reported greater participation in high-impact experiences, they reported lower overall satisfaction than the other transfer students. Mr. McCormick believes that has something to do with the reasons behind their switching from one four-year institution to another.

“I think a large number of horizontal transfers are changing institutions because they were not able to succeed in making good relationships at their first college,” says Mr. McCormick, who is an associate professor of education at Indiana University at Bloomington. “Some of these obstacles don’t go away with a change of scenery.”

That transfer students have less exposure to high-impact activities is “disappointing,” according to the report. As the survey indicates, it says, those offerings do much to enrich students’ education.

A Senior Experience

This year’s report emphasized the importance of a culminating senior experience that “integrates and synthesizes learning within the academic major, provides opportunities to reflect on the overall college experience, and may facilitate the transition to life after college.”

With responses from about 133,000 seniors, the survey found that 40 percent of native seniors had participated in such an activity, compared with 30 percent of transfer students from other four-year colleges and 25 percent from community colleges.

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Eighty-five percent of faculty members considered completing a culminating senior experience important, and it’s clear why. Most students who participated in a senior seminar or capstone course reported substantial personal advances in terms of making decisions based on evidence (78.5 percent), thinking critically and analytically (77.4 percent), learning effectively on their own (77.3 percent), and developing intellectual curiosity (77 percent).

The study also found that students who participated in those courses did better on benchmarks of effective educational practice, such as active and collaborative learning, level of academic challenge, student-faculty interaction, and supportive campus environment.

Those are the benchmarks that Nessie has tracked in its 10-year history. Nearly 1,400 baccalaureate colleges and universities in the United States and Canada have administered the survey at least once. And for the first time, the survey this year tracked data at a number of those institutions from 2004 to 2009. The information is divided into two categories—for first-year students and for seniors—in order, Mr. McCormick says, to compare apples to apples.

This year’s survey included information about colleges that had administered the test at least four times in the past five years. While most had not seen substantial changes, some colleges had shown steady improvement in student engagement—but with a disparity between first-year students and seniors. Forty-one percent of the colleges saw positive trends among first-year students in at least one of the five benchmarks, while 28 percent saw the same among seniors.

It is difficult to know, the report says, whether the “first-year experience represents the ‘low-hanging fruit’ with respect to improving the undergraduate experience and is thus more amenable to improvement, or that systematic improvement efforts are more often targeted at the first-year experience.”

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Mr. McCormick thinks colleges tend to put more effort into first-year enhancement, as a means of improving their retention rates, than into programming for older students. He believes that when institutions do more to engage all their students, better outcomes follow.

“From the beginning,” he says, “Nessie has been all about diagnosis and improvement, not data for the sake of data.”

Still, some educators believe that there’s still plenty of room for improvement. While 75 percent of the faculty members surveyed this year said their colleges were active in data collection, only about a third thought enough was being done with the findings.

We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
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