New PDP Insights Dashboard Reveals the Pandemic’s Effect on First-Year Momentum Toward College Degree Completion
Transfer enrollment is making a comeback, surpassing 2020 figures. The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center’s fall 2024 Transfer Enrollment and Pathways report reveals that transfer enrollment, which comprises 13% of non-freshmen undergraduates, grew for the third straight year.
The ability to transfer between institutions provides students with greater flexibility in their postsecondary educational pathways. The Transfer Enrollment and Pathways report, which replaces the previous Transfer and Progress report series, finds that college transfer enrollment is now 7.9% greater than in the fall of 2020.
"The growth in transfers this fall is a further indication that students are adjusting postsecondary goals in response to changing education and labor market conditions," said Doug Shapiro, Executive Director of the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. “That’s good news, especially for those who are able to return from stopouts by finding colleges that better meet their needs.”
Nearly 500,000 students transferred from a two-year to a four-year institution this past fall, a number that is now comparable to fall 2020 (-2,300, -0.5%). Although this remains the most common pathway for transfer students, the share of all transfer students that move from a two-year to a four-year institution declined 3.5 percentage points from fall 2020 to fall 2024.
Additional report highlights include:
Community College Transfer Enrollment: This past fall, 390,000 students transferred into a community college, an increase of 13.5% from the fall of 2020. However, total community college enrollment still has not recovered from pandemic declines (-52,300, -1.5% from fall 2020).
Continuing Transfer Students: The fall of 2024 saw the second straight year of enrollment growth for continuing transfer students — those who were enrolled at a different institution in the spring or summer term immediately prior.
View the complete Transfer Enrollment and Pathways report.
"The growth in transfers this fall is a further indication that students are adjusting postsecondary goals in response to changing education and labor market conditions. That’s good news, especially for those who are able to return from stopouts by finding colleges that better meet their needs."
Doug Shapiro
Executive Director, National Student Clearinghouse Research Center
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New PDP Insights Dashboard Reveals the Pandemic’s Effect on First-Year Momentum Toward College Degree Completion
The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center has released its new interactive Postsecondary Data Partnership (PDP) Insights dashboard, which highlights year-over-year changes in credit completion ratio (CCR), credit accumulation rates (CAR), and credit hours attempted. This analysis allows institutions to understand the impact of the pandemic on students’ first-year momentum toward degree completion.
- CCR is the ratio of credits earned to credits attempted in a student’s first year of enrollment and measures the efficiency of a student’s progress toward earning a credential.
- CAR is an aggregate metric that identifies what share of students surpassed credit-hour thresholds within their first year.
- Credit hours attempted are the total credit hours a student enrolled in during their first year, which provides more context to the CCR and CAR outcome metrics.
PDP empowers institutions by providing comprehensive data, easier analysis, centralized reporting functions, and interactive visualizations with benchmark functionality. The report from January 2024 using PDP data analyzes the CCR, CAR, and credit hours attempted by first-time students who enrolled in a PDP institution in the fall semester of 2018-19, 2019-20, 2020-21, and 2021-22.
Key Takeaways
- Since the pandemic, there has been an overall decrease in CAR and CCR for full- and part-time students in their first year primarily due to students attempting fewer credits.
- Full-time students in the most recent 2021-22 cohort attempted an average of two fewer credits than those in the 2019-20 cohort and earned less than three-quarters of credits attempted in their first year.
- The patterns of pandemic-related decline varied among different racial and ethnic groups, primarily affecting Black, Hispanic, and Asian students. Younger students under 21 also saw declines in CCR and CAR during the pandemic.
A More In-Depth Look
The interactive tables in the report give you an in-depth perspective on the pandemic’s impact on students’ early momentum metrics. The tables allow you to look at the CCR and CAR for both full- and part-time students based on institution type, demographics (i.e., race, gender, and age), and field of major.
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