New Measures of Postsecondary Education Transfer Performance: Transfer-out rates for community colleges, transfer student graduation rates at four-year colleges, and the institutional dyads contributing to transfer student success

The U.S. postsecondary education system provides students with many flexible pathways to earning a bachelor’s degree. One of the most important of these is the opportunity to start a degree at a community college and transfer to a four-year degree program. Community colleges provide access to postsecondary education in diverse geographies (urban, rural, suburban), are open access and low cost, and offer an array of programs and credentials focused on both immediate employment and subsequent degree attainment through transfer to a four-year institution.¹  However, while nearly 80 percent of community college students say they intend to transfer and eventually earn bachelor’s degrees,² actual transfer and degree completion rates are a challenge: only 16 percent of students who start in community colleges ultimately earn bachelor’s degrees within six years, with lower rates for students from low-income backgrounds and students of color.³ Addressing this gap can help save students time and money in getting a degree, and will help diversify baccalaureate pathways because over half of students of color and low-income students start in the two-year sector.⁴ The latter is especially important in the wake of the recent Supreme Court ruling severely limiting the use of race in college admissions. The U.S. Department of Education (Department) has developed a resource guide for states and institutions to identify key strategies to improve the transfer system and completion rates.⁵

In this blog, we use data from the National Student Loan Data System (NSLDS) at the U.S. Department of Education to measure the performance of the U.S. postsecondary education system in providing a pathway for students who start at community colleges to eventually graduate with bachelor’s degrees. We constructed a sample of roughly 620,000 students from all 50 states who received Title IV aid and enrolled in a community college as their first postsecondary institution in 2014.⁶ We followed these students for 8 years across multiple institutions and observed whether they successfully transferred from their initial community college and whether they subsequently obtained degrees from predominantly bachelor’s-granting institutions to measure the performance of both sending and receiving institutions.⁷ We also examined the role that pairs of community colleges and four-year institutions – or dyads – play in transfer student outcomes. We share these results at the state- and institution-level to inform state transfer policy and local implementation of transfer policies and practices.

State and Institution-Level Findings

Overall, we find that 13 percent of Title IV students that start at community colleges ultimately earn bachelor’s degrees within eight years, but with considerable variation across states.⁸ Figure 1 shows this variability, with some states (New Jersey, New York, Illinois, Maryland, Virginia) having much higher community college BA attainment than average. Though not shown here, state rankings are very similar for Pell students specifically.

Both two- and four-year institutions play a key role in determining this overall state transfer performance. While community colleges provide the onramp to the pathway, public- and private- four-year institutions provide the destination and support for students to complete their bachelor’s degrees. A state’s performance depends on both its two-year and four-year sectors’ performance, meaning a state can only perform well overall if both its community colleges are adept at preparing and sending transfer students and its four-year institutions are successful in enrolling and graduating them.

We measured the performance of the two- and four-year sector in each state with two metrics. For each state, we calculated the rate at which students who start at a public, certificate- or associates-granting institution ever transfer to a predominantly bachelors-granting institution within eight years. We call this the state’s “transfer-out rate” or “Access” for short.Next, we compute the rate at which students who transferred from a community college go on to earn a degree from a four-year institution within eight years of initially starting community college. We call this the “transfers’ bachelor’s completion rate” or “Success,” where we emphasize the metrics presented here capture just one dimension of institutional performance and not a comprehensive assessment of whether an institution is successfully fulfilling its mission or helping its students attain their goals.⁹ A states’ community college BA completion rate is the product of these two state-level metrics. The performance of individual institutions along these two metrics contribute to the state-level performance of the two-year and four-year sectors, which in turn determines the overall state transfer performance shown in Figure 1. Figure 2 illustrates how high levels of both access and success are necessary for a state to have high overall performance. For example, Illinois has similar access levels to other states, however Illinois has significantly higher success and consequently is the third highest state overall in Figure 1.

To better understand the role of specific institutions in generating these state-level rates, we compute institution-specific versions of the transfer-out rate (for community colleges) and the transfers’ bachelor’s completion rate (for four-year colleges).¹⁰

Tables 1 and 2 report the community college and four-year institution in each state that have the highest transfer-out rate and the highest transfers’ bachelor’s completion rate, respectively.¹¹,¹² Even across the top institutions in each state there are considerable differences in these metrics. Among the community colleges with the states’ top transfer-out rates the average is about 38 percent, but they range from 71 percent down to 19 percent. Among the four-year institutions with the top transfers’ bachelor’s completion rates, the average is 66 percent, ranging from 89 percent down to 30 percent. Thus, even among the top performing institutions in each state, there is still a wide range of performance across institutions. The Department is releasing a complete list of all community colleges and four-year institutions in each state that have a sufficient number of students to be able to compute the transfer-out rate and the transfers’ bachelor’s completion rate, respectively.¹³ This list can be found here.

The Importance of Partnerships

The above metrics are measured at institutions separately, though an institution’s performance is influenced by the policies of the state in which it is located and policies and practices of potential partner institutions. For instance, co-located two-year and four-year institutions with strong transfer policies in place, such as common course numbering systems or articulation agreements, will mutually benefit both institutions. Given the codependence of individual two- and four-years’ performance, it is important to understand the role of these relationships in improving overall transfer performance.

The documented success of institutional partnerships – such as Northern Virginia Community College and George Mason University’s ADVANCE or the Valencia Community College and University of Central Florida’s DirectConnect programs – illustrate that the relationships between pairs of institutions may play a key role in facilitating efficient transfer. To investigate this further, we measure the performance of institution “dyads” in each state and describe how they contribute to overall state transfer performance.

We define a dyad as a pair of institutions consisting of a public community college and a public or private four-year institution. Rather than look at all possible combinations of all two- and four-year institutions, we restrict the set of dyads we analyze to pairs of institutions where there is reasonable potential to have many students transfer between them. We do this by creating pairs of institutions where the share of students who send FAFSA information to a community college that also send to a specific 4-year institution is high, which we refer to as FAFSA sending overlap.¹⁴ Within a dyad, we measure transfer performance as the share of students who start at the dyad’s community college that go on to eventually graduate from the dyad’s four-year institution. We call this metric the dyad bachelor’s completion rate.¹⁵ As with the institution performance metrics, there is considerable variation in performance across the top dyad in each state, listed in Table 3. Among the states’ top dyad bachelor’s completion rates the average is about eight percent, but these range from 20 percent down to one percent.

States’ overall performance seems to be driven in part by the performance of dyads within each state, particularly involving large community colleges. In Figure 3 we compare the ranking of states from Figure 1 to the performance of the dyads in each state. We include dyads formed by the five highest enrollment community colleges in each state and for each community college the four-year institutions with the highest FAFSA sends overlap. We label an illustrative high and low performing dyad in each state. States with lower overall transfer performance, such as Ohio, tend to have lower performance among their largest dyads. Whereas states with higher overall transfer performance, such as Virginia and California, tend to have higher performance among their largest dyads. Some pairs of institutions with known partnerships, such as Northern Virginia Community College and George Mason University, have particularly high rates. We interpret this as suggestive evidence that having high-performing dyads in a state may contribute to overall transfer performance. This figure also illustrates that, even within high performing states, dyads differ considerably in their transfer performance.

Discussion

The potential for the U.S. postsecondary education system to provide an effective pathway from community colleges to the baccalaureate depends on a complex system of relationships between state policies, the community college and four-year sectors, and individual institutions within these states. The considerable difference in transfer performance among states is not just a function of community colleges and four-year institutions acting in isolation. In addition to enacting and implementing effective state transfer policy, state differences also derive in part from differences in the performance of partnerships between institutions in the community college and four-year sectors. An important step in understanding what makes for an effective transfer system is understanding what makes a dyad a high performer. Investigating the features of top performing dyads may unlock new insights into understanding how to improve the performance of dyads that have unrealized potential to improve transfer student completion.