New! PDP Offers More Data & Analytics for More Informed Decision Making
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
Additional Resources:
New! PDP Offers More Data & Analytics for More Informed Decision Making
Our latest enhancements to the Postsecondary Data Partnership (PDP) include more data and insights to aid your decision-making, as well as new search functionality and expanded filtering options. You can combine filtering and the new search functionality within any of our five PDP benchmarking dashboards to build your benchmarking group. We’ve also introduced better combinations of options within PDP’s benchmarking filters, so you can refine your benchmarking group by combining the improved filtering functionality with the new search capability.
Among the ways that we’ve improved PDP to offer more data and insights are:
- Executive Summary Dashboard provides a snapshot of your institution’s first-year enrollment, first-year progression, persistence and retention, and outcomes
- Benchmarking allows you to search by OPEID/school name plus filters (with more filter options now available)
- New Transfer Benchmarking Dashboard visual on post-transfer outcomes
- More analysis-ready (AR) file fields, like critical “where” information (OPEID/State/Carnegie Classification/Locale)
- New program of study filter added (including on benchmarking)
Along with all the improvements we’ve introduced, PDP still delivers the value you count on, including course-level data, benchmarking, 16 dashboards plus AR files, the Student Insights Dashboard, and the comprehensive enrollment, degree, and transfer data coverage only available via the Clearinghouse.
Using PDP is easier than ever too, read our previous post, “Latest PDP Improvements Deliver a Better User Experience & More,” to learn how.
