On Transfer Students and Transfer-Friendliness

Transfer students are relatively anonymous players in this season of front-page admissions angst, but on many campuses they are a crucial part of the enrollment picture. And some colleges expect to rely more heavily on transfer students to fill their classes in the coming years.

A report released today by the National Association for College Admission Counseling explores the realm of students who start at one institution and end up at another—about a third of all college students.  (The report is based on NACAC data, and was administered in partnership with a dissertation project at Michigan State University.)

Nationally, the average acceptance rate for transfer students was 64 percent in the fall of 2006, compared with 69 percent for first-year students, says the report. On average, colleges enrolled 64 percent of the transfer students they admitted, compared with 42 percent of the first-year students who received acceptances.

For both groups, grade-point averages were the most important factor in admissions, but for transfer students, high-school performance generally took a back seat to college grades. Standardized test scores were also relatively unimportant in evaluations of transfer students.

Jon Boeckenstedt, associate vice president for enrollment policy and planning at DePaul University, has thought a lot about the needs of transfer students over the years. DePaul has built a robust transfer pipeline, which has grown in recent years. In the 2002-3 academic year, DePaul had 5,576 transfer applicants and enrolled 2,167. In the current academic year, the university had 7,235 transfer applicants and enrolled 2,526. (Those numbers do not include summer terms.)

On Monday, I asked Mr. Boeckenstedt about how his large university tries to maintain a “transfer friendly” admissions process.

How do transfer students fit into your overall enrollment operation?

We consider it an offshoot of our mission. Transfer students bring a lot to the classroom, to the community. It’s a big part of who we are. There are a lot of students who decide for themselves that it’s better geographically or economically to start at a community college and transfer in later. We’ve invested a lot of time, effort, and research over the last five years to make sure DePaul is transfer-friendly and tech-friendly.

Before they apply, students can now transmit their transcripts online, and feed them into our system to get an almost instantaneous sense of how credits will transfer, and then also see how they will transfer to a particular degree program. This gives them a better sense of how long it might take them to get a degree. … As opposed to freshman admissions, we publish cleaner, more precise cutoffs for admission, so you know it’s only a matter of a certain number of credits and a certain grade-point average for 99.8 percent of students.

In general, what’s different about a transfer applicant and a first-year applicant, from an enrollment perspective?

First of all, freshmen follow a fairly lockstep process. We know when they apply. A transfer may come in at any term, including the summer. They may have been at one or two places before coming to DePaul, and they may switch back and forth between part-time or full-time. You might have a  student who went to Arizona State and decided to come back to Chicago. Or a student who went to a community college who transferred in after finishing an associate degree. Or we could have someone who’s been out of college five years, decides he needs a degree, and comes back. So the paths they take may vary, and you have to be flexible in all ways as a university. Freshmen are easy. For transfers, it can be anytime, anywhere.

When you say ‘flexible,’ what do you mean?

You can’t say that everyone’s gonna come in and do things exactly the way it makes it easiest on you. … The whole idea of deadlines and timelines is something you need to be more aware of if you’re going to be a transfer-friendly institution. Five percent of people put things off to the last minute. It’s not that transfer students are irresponsible, but they have life commitments other students may not have. So if you’re not allowing for that, you’re going to discourage a lot of very capable, very deserving students who just can’t make that decision until the week before classes start.

What’s something you’ve learned about working with transfer students over the years?

Whereas freshmen are looking for fit and a lot of softer or more nebulous elements of finding the perfect place, transfers, in general, are asking two, maybe three questions. How will my credits transfer? How long is it going to take me to finish my degree? And what is it going to cost me? They’re very transactional in that sense. So you need to be able to give students answers.

The frustrating thing about freshman admissions is that you can do everything right, but the student still decides go elsewhere because another campus just feel rights to them. Transfers are much more able to quantify and put into words the factors that are driving their decision. They think it’s going to advance their career, and they know how long that’s going to take.

What about tips for other colleges?

The biggest thing is to look at things from the student’s side: understanding that students who are transferring would like to meet with someone in the college. So you may need to stay open in the evening. And you may need to be open the week before classes start. All those sorts of things contribute to it. More than that, you need to have a process and procedure to deal with credits from a wide variety of institutions.