Publications

The second edition of the Transfer Playbook provides guidance for achieving excellence in transfer and bachelor’s attainment for community college students based on practices observed at exemplary community college and university partnerships.

These two reports use student data disaggregated by race/ethnicity, neighborhood income, and age to measure the performance of two- and four-year institutions in enabling students who start college at a community college to transfer and complete bachelor’s programs. State-by-state breakdowns of transfer metrics designed for use by college and state system leaders are included in the reports and in an online data dashboard.

This brief, published by The Campaign for College Opportunity, explores ways transfer reform can close equity gaps in bachelor’s degree attainment by providing vital degree pathways for students from minoritized backgrounds.

This report argues that a more inclusive definition of STEM that accounts for STEM-oriented technical training programs would better represent the contribution community colleges make to STEM education and the STEM workforce.

Drawing on administrative records from transfer-intending community college starters across three states, this paper develops a set of early STEM momentum metrics that are useful indicators of subsequent STEM transfer and bachelor’s degree attainment.

This report describes the rationale, goals, and activities of the Strengthening Michigan Humanities project, and it provides statewide statistics and trends on community college enrollment, transfer, and bachelor’s degree completion in humanities fields.

Using nine years of data from one state, this paper tracks completion and transfer outcomes to examine when gaps between Black, Hispanic, and White community college students occur, and it estimates the benefits of reaching early academic milestones for such students.

This journal article examines how students at six community colleges identified and weighed possible transfer destination colleges, and how dedicated and personalized advisement shaped students’ transfer plans and contributed to their transfer outcomes.

Drawing on findings from a study of postsecondary college transcript and degree records, this brief describes metrics that may be useful in assessing efforts to improve STEM transfer outcomes.

This fact sheet outlines challenges in supporting successful student transfer from community colleges to four-year institutions and considerations for improving the transfer process.

This report builds off previous research on American Honors to look at the unintended consequences of college promise programs for the economic mobility of high-achieving, low-income students.

In this Innovative Higher Education article, the authors examine the development and dissolution of a partnership between a privately held firm and six community colleges, which had established honors programs with the goal of facilitating students' transfer to selective institutions.

Using transcript-level data from two community college state systems and a nationally representative survey, this short report examines how course-taking in humanities and liberal arts at community colleges affects transfer and outcomes at four-year colleges.

This short report provides a systematic accounting of the provision of humanities and liberal arts education at public colleges in the United States, including community colleges.

In 2012, Quad Learning partnered with two community colleges to pilot American Honors, a program designed to help academically talented community college students overcome the challenges of transferring to more selective four-year destinations. This paper traces the components of the program's socially conscious theory of change, its for-profit business model, and the tensions between the two.

Using National Student Clearinghouse data, this paper introduces a two-stage, input-adjusted, value-added analytic framework for identifying partnerships of two- and four-year institutions that are particularly effective in enabling students to transfer and earn bachelor’s degrees.

This paper assesses the degree to which community college websites present challenges for students looking for information on how to transfer to a four-year institution.

Using detailed administrative data from Virginia, this journal article examines whether community college “vertical transfer” students who resemble “native four-year” students in their accumulated college-level credits and performance at their point of entry into the four-year sector perform equally well in terms of both academic and labor market outcomes.

This CCRC working paper uses data-mining techniques to analyze student transcripts from two states and identify variables associated with excess credits among bachelor’s degree completers who started at a community college.

This guide aims to help state entities organize workshops for two- and four-year institutions to improve transfer and graduation outcomes for their students through data analysis and self-reflection of institutional practices and the development of action plans.

This guide provides instructions for community colleges that want to use National Student Clearinghouse data to assess their own effectiveness and that of particular transfer partnerships in helping students to transfer and complete bachelor’s degrees.

This journal article offers a set of essential transfer practices culled from national fieldwork to two- and four-year institutional transfer partnerships identified using NSC data as highly effective in supporting transfer student success.

Using student data, this report provides information on the outcomes of students who attended Macomb Community College and then transferred to one of 14 four-year destination colleges.

Based on a mixed-methods study at six colleges, this brief examines the domestic population served by American Honors; its key programmatic features; and community college student, faculty, and staff perspectives on the program.

Using data from two state systems, this paper examines whether it is more efficient for bachelor’s degree seekers to start at a two-year college.

Based on three sets of analyses, this report to the Greater Texas Foundation recommends ways that state policy could help to improve outcomes for community college transfer students in Texas.

This report investigates the national landscape of computer science students at community colleges in order to better understand student behaviors and institutional characteristics that support or hinder community college students’ efforts to attain a computer science bachelor’s degree.

This CAPSEE working paper examines the effects of four-year to two-year college transfer on “struggling” students, or those who earned less than a 3.0 grade point average in the first term.

This playbook is a practical guide to designing and implementing a key set of practices that will help community colleges and their four-year college partners improve bachelor’s completion rates for students who start at community colleges.

Using detailed administrative data from Virginia, this CAPSEE working paper examines how and why the community college pathway to a baccalaureate influences students’ degree attainment and short-term labor market performance.

This report uses five metrics to measure the effectiveness of two- and four-year institutions in enabling community college students to transfer to four-year institutions and earn bachelor’s degrees.

Using data on students who entered community college and then transferred, this paper examines the impact on bachelor’s degree attainment of earning an associate degree before transferring to a four-year college.

This research overview reviews findings on transfer from community colleges to four-year colleges, including student outcomes, barriers to transfer, the economic benefits of transfer, and potential benefits to four-year colleges.

Using data on credit accumulation, award receipt, and earnings, this paper examines whether it is better for students to earn an associate degree before transferring to a four-year college.

Based on analyses of unit record data of first-time community college students in the state of Florida, this paper examines the role of academic preparation in the transition from community colleges to four-year institutions.

This article advances the literature on the impact of community colleges on baccalaureate attainment by estimating new models that allow controlling for pathways of enrollment while using different measures of educational expectations and correcting for college choice.

The rise of articulation agreements constitutes a new state strategy to cope with the stagnation of higher education appropriations, rising tuition, and high demand for affordable higher education.

This article analyzes two nationally representative datasets to examine how the likelihood of transfer is affected by social background, precollege academic characteristics, external demands at college entrance, and experiences during college

This article examines whether statewide articulation agreements increase the probability of vertical transfers from two-year to four-year colleges.

This paper details a qualitative study of four-year graduates who attended Central Piedmont Community College.