Colleges Catering to Growing Ranks of Transfer, Older Students

ST. LOUIS (AP)—Some head to a four-year college campus after two years at a community college. Others wait nearly a lifetime, delayed by jobs, kids and real-world responsibilities. Few find time for fraternities, football games and frivolity.

For many new students, the first-year college experience is an academic and social buffet, a dizzying array of activities and opportunities to herald the passage into adulthood. Not so for transfer students, a growing but largely neglected group whose needs are as varied as the circumstances that bring them to a college campus in the first place.

That’s starting to change. With more students opting to start their higher education at affordable community colleges and the stagnant economy sending even more late-blooming learners back to school, campus administrators now realize that catering to transfers and other nontraditional students makes academic and financial sense.

“Recruitment is great. We bring in new students and get them engaged,” said Melissa Hattman, director of transfer services and articulation at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. “But transfers are like the forgotten college students.”

With an average student age of 27 and more than 75 percent of its 12,500 undergraduates starting their college careers elsewhere, the largely commuter St. Louis campus depends heavily on transfers. There is a student union study lounge and resource center, peer mentors to help ease the transition, even an honor society specifically created for transfers.

“It’s the perfect school to go back to in my category,” said Scott Tapp, 34, a senior public policy major who earned his high school equivalency degree in 1990 and has spent the past 18 years in the workplace. “There were more people in my age range than 18- or 19-year-olds, especially in evening classes.”

Tapp, the father of a newborn daughter, continues to work as a computer industry and financial services consultant. He is active in student government and spends 20 hours a week at his campus job in the transfer services office.

Among his peers, such campus involvement is largely the exception. The 2008 National Survey of Student Engagement, an annual Indiana University study that examines student life on campuses across the country, found that transfer students on average interact less with faculty, are less likely to collaborate with classmates, participate in campus activities less often and are less likely to seek career counseling and advice.

More than 40 percent of the students at 769 colleges and universities who responded to the survey were classified as transfer students.

“These are students who fall through the cracks,” said Bonita Jacobs, an associate professor of higher education at the University of North Texas and executive director of its National Institute for the Study of Transfer Students.

At North Texas, which this year admitted 4,000 transfer students, 150 of those students live together in a special dormitory wing set aside for transfers. In February, college and university presidents across the state gathered for a “Texas transfer success summit.”

“Campuses are realizing how valuable these students are,” said Marc Cutright, also a North Texas associate professor of higher education. “They are very mature students who come in and add a lot to the culture.”

At the University of California-Santa Barbara, an annual infusion of 1,500 transfer students led officials to create a four-credit “transfer success” course which builds on similar efforts at UCSB and elsewhere that until now were aimed primarily at traditional first-year students.

Students learn effective study habits and stress management techniques. They are taught how to cultivate relationships with professors and hear from other transfer students who successfully made the transition.

“Freshmen make all the same mistakes,” said Britt Andreatta, a UCSB assistant dean of students who oversees first-year programs and teaches the transfer course. “But they’ve got three years to recover.”

Hasmik Gushchyan, a 20-year-old junior, is enrolled in Andreatta’s course after receiving an associate degree from Los Angeles City College.

The course has not only helped with the move to a larger campus, it has also offered Gushchyan a built-in social network.

“It’s all transfers, so you can relate to everybody in there,” she said. “People who have been here since freshman year, they’ve already established a group of friends.” For transfer students, “It’s harder to find those connections,” she said.

Andreatta predicted that the belated focus on the needs and challenges of transfer students — whether community college graduates, adults returning to school after years or decades or those at a new institution but still on the four-year plan — will only increase.

“They’ve always needed our help, but the timing wasn’t right,” she said. “We’re just starting to scratch the surface now. I suspect in the next five years, we’re going to see some real changes in direction.” 

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