While often an overlooked and unrepresented population consisting of 1,252,418 students, or roughly 15% of the undergraduate student population at public 4-year institutions, transfer students now more than ever are now making up a larger percentage of student bodies across the country’s 4-year colleges and universities. Created to better help education leaders address policy centered around the enrollment impacts that transfer students can have on an educational institution, research published by the National Student Clearinghouse addresses enrollment demographic characteristics and transfer behaviors of over 11 million undergraduate transfer students from fall 2023 over a fixed panel of institutions that have committed to providing data integral to understanding the transfer rates. On top of that, the report published in February of 2024 also provides insight into why students choose to transfer.
Up about 3% from years prior, overall undergraduate enrollment of transfer students saw a 5.4% increase, roughly a jump of 65,000 students, in 2023, with around 70% of these students transferring through Transfer Pathway Programs. Transfer Pathway Programs, such as the Georgia Tech Fine Arts & Sciences Transfer Pathway Program, are great ways for students who were not offered admittance to a college or university to still have a chance to later attend.
Georgia Tech specifically admitted 1,440 transfer students out of the 6,052 total transfer applicants for the 2024 academic year. This transfer class profile pulled from a diverse background of students from 240 total colleges across 43 different states; with around 1125 of these students transferring into Georgia Tech through a transfer pathway program. The Institute in total enrolls over 20,000 undergraduate students in total, however, the school transfer admittance rate is still competitive to that of its standard admittance rate, of which 33% of in-state applicants are admitted and 10% of the institute’s out-of-state applicants are admitted in 2024. Therefore, an admittance of 33% for in-state transfer students and admitting 20% of its out-of-state transfer applicants in 2024 roughly mirrors first-year admittance for the school in general, and even slightly favors out-of-state students.
Transferring in general also provides many benefits past having an educational background that is diverse from your peers. Using even more stats from Georgia Tech’s 2024 transfer class, the average transfer student transferred with over 40 credit hours of coursework already completed, which is roughly equal to 3 semester’s worth of course-work. Not only does this put transfer students significantly ahead of the curve regarding the overall completion of their degree, but it also possibly saves students thousands of dollars in tuition if the student transferred from a school that costs less, and with more than 40% of students in pursuit of a bachelor’s degree beginning their undergraduate education at a 2-year school or community college, the likely-hood of this being the case is very high (Zuckerman & Lo, 2021). A 2024 report from the Education Data Initiative indicates that the average cost of tuition is up 4.11% year-over-year; with the average tuition of an in-state student at a public 4-year institution being roughly $10,000, the average tuition of an out-of-state student at a public 4-year institution being more than $25,000, and the average cost of tuition for a student at a 2-year institution being less than $5,000 a semester. Therefore, an undergraduate student at a 2-year institution pays roughly 50-80% less than their counterpart at a public 4-year institution. All of this is to say that there is a high likelihood that those 3 semester’s worth of credit hours for an in-state student potentially costs $15,000 less for an in-state transfer student, and $60,000 for an out-of-state transfer student, both of which are no small sum.
So with roughly 15% of the undergraduate student population at public 4-year institutions such as Georgia Tech now consisting of transfer students, now more than ever transfer students, an overlooked and unrepresented population of students, are on the rise.
References
Georgia Institute of Technology . (n.d.). 2024 transfer class profile – undergraduate admission. 2024 TRANSFER CLASS PROFILE. https://admission.gatech.edu/images/pdf/2024TransferProfile.pdf
Georgia Institute of Technology. (n.d.). Student demographics. Student Demographics |Institutional Research & Planning. https://irp.gatech.edu/disclosures/student-demographics
Hanson, M., & Checked, F. (2024, May 28). Average cost of college [2024]: Yearly tuition + expenses. Average Cost of College & Tuition. https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college
National Student Clearinghouse. (n.d.). Transfer and progress. National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. https://nscresearchcenter.org/transfer-and-progress/
Zuckerman, A. L., & Lo, S. M. (2021, August 23). Transfer student experiences and identity navigation in STEM: Overlapping figured worlds of success. Transfer Student Experiences and Identity Navigation in STEM: Overlapping Figured Worlds of Success. https://www.lifescied.org/doi/10.1187/cbe.20-06-0121