Unlocking STEM Talent: What Happens to Transfers at the Four-Year College?
Community college students represent a major opportunity to expand the nation’s talent pipeline to STEM bachelor’s and graduate degrees. Yet students pursuing STEM transfer pathways face substantial barriers to bachelor’s completion, many of which arise after they transfer to a four-year institution. In November 2026, CCRC released a report using National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) data that examines the pathways of community college transfer students to STEM bachelor’s completion and enrollment. The full report—Unlocking STEM Talent: What Happens to Transfer Students at the Four-Year College?—discusses research methods, national and state-by-state findings, as well as implications of transfer gaps for community colleges, four-year institutions, and state systems.
The purpose of this dashboard is to show state-by-state results from the report. Per NSC requirements, some state results are masked for privacy when the minimum number of institutions or students for a particular measure is not met.
Outcome Definitions
- Share of bachelor’s completers who complete in STEM: Percentage of bachelor’s completers who completed a STEM bachelor’s degree. We compute this measure by transfer status group.
Time to Completion
To ensure comparability, we focus our analysis of time to completion on community college transfer students only, emphasizing differences between STEM and non-STEM transfer bachelor’s completers. All time-to-completion metrics are measured in calendar years.
- On-time bachelor’s completion among CC transfer completers: Percentage of bachelor’s completers who completed a bachelor’s degree within four calendar years from the date of first enrollment at the community college, where first enrollment is at any time within six years prior to four-year entry.
- Years pre-transfer: Calendar years between the first enrollment at the community college and four-year entry. Note that this may include periods in which the student was not enrolled if they did not enroll continuously throughout the period.
- Years post-transfer: Calendar years between four-year entry and bachelor’s completion date. Note that this may include periods in which the student was not enrolled if they did not enroll continuously throughout the period.
Graduate Enrollment
We focus on students who enrolled in graduate school in the academic year following their bachelor’s degree award date. For simplicity, we refer to this as graduate enrollment in the year of bachelor’s completion.
- Graduate enrollment rate in the year after bachelor’s completion: The percentage of bachelor’s completers who enrolled in graduate school in the academic year following their bachelor’s degree award date. In our analysis, we differentiate between graduate enrollment of CC transfer and non-transfer completers, and between STEM and non-STEM bachelor’s completers.
- STEM graduate enrollment rate in the year after bachelor’s completion: The percentage of bachelor’s completers who enrolled in a STEM program in graduate school in the academic year following their bachelor’s award date. In our analysis, we differentiate between graduate enrollment of CC transfer and non-transfer completers, and we focus on the graduate enrollments of STEM bachelor’s completers.
STEM Definitions
We separate outcomes by STEM and non-STEM bachelor’s completers and by STEM fields of study. To conduct this classification, we use NSC reports of 6-digit CIP codes for bachelor’s awards and declared programs in graduate school. In some figures, we display outcomes disaggregated by the following STEM fields:
Biosciences
Computer and Information Sciences
Engineering
Mathematics and Statistics
Physical Sciences