Margaret Sullivan

Understanding engineering transfer students: Demographic characteristics and educational outcomes

Transfer students make up a significant share of engineering college graduates, yet their persistence is seldom studied, largely because of the lack of longitudinal data. This analysis used longitudinal data from 11 universities enrolling large numbers of engineering students to investigate the demographic characteristics and educational outcomes of transfer students in engineering relative to non-transfers. We find that students who transfer to four-year engineering programs are more likely to come from under-represented minority groups (URMs) and less likely to be women, although both groups are over-represented at two-year colleges. The findings confirm existing research indicating that, on average, non-transfers outperform transfer students, and non-URMs outperform URMs. But we also find that URM transfers, and especially Black transfers, are no less successful than nontransfer students - indicating that the transfer pathway is an effective bridge to a four-year degree. This is partly true for women transfers who do as well as men but are outperformed by women non-transfers. Finally, we find significant variation in outcomes between full- and part-time students, which may be driving the observed differences by transfer status. Our results should inform debates regarding the efficacy of the transfer pathway in engineering, particularly for women and URMs.

Black engineering transfer students: What explains their success?

The transfer pathway, particularly from two- to four-year colleges, is often seen as a vehicle to expand the science and engineering workforce by increasing college participation of underrepresented groups, such as black or African American students. In an earlier study, after controlling for credits earned, we found that black transfer students are more likely to persist in engineering than non-transfer black students - a finding that does not hold for students of other ethnicities. In this paper, we study this somewhat puzzling difference in outcomes for black transfer students. Using an updated version of the longitudinal data set used in the earlier study that enables us to distinguish transfers from two- versus four-year institutions, we find that (1) black students in engineering are more likely to transfer from other four-year institutions than from two-year institutions, and (2) transfers from two- versus four-year institutions differ on several key characteristics, including gender, full- versus part-time enrollment status, and education outcomes including six-year graduation in engineering. Observing that our earlier results were driven by transfer students from four-year institutions, we focus this analysis on transfers from two-year colleges to identify factors associated with their performance and persistence in engineering. We find that gender and academic achievement (engineering GPA) - not transfer status - are driving graduation outcomes for two-year black transfer students. Black women are 28 percent less likely to drop out, IS percent less likely to fail an engineering course, and 25 percent more likely to graduate in engineering in six years than black men. In terms of performance, for every tenth of a grade point increase in engineering GPA, the odds of a black student graduating with an engineering degree in six years improves by 13.7 percent. These results should inform debates regarding the effectiveness of the two-year transfer pathway in engineering for black and other minority students.