StudentTracker Helps Surry Community College Decrease the Non-Success Rate of Its Students By 48%
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:
StudentTracker Helps Surry Community College Decrease the Non-Success Rate of Its Students By 48%
Watch Surry’s Executive Director of Institutional Research Speak About the Impact of StudentTracker
The National Student Clearinghouse offers live webinars where you can learn and ask questions about our services. While our staff hosts many of our webinars, we also welcome clients to share their own use cases.
For example, in one webinar, Michael Faulkner, Executive Director of Institutional Research at Surry Community College, shared how StudentTracker for Colleges and Universities helped his college cut the non-success rate of its students nearly in half.
As part of a continuous improvement cycle, staff at Surry review procedures, policies, and metrics to ensure that they’re not creating barriers for students. More than three years ago, they found the college ranked below the state average in four of the seven main categories, including curriculum completion measurement. As a result of this metric, Surry predicted that one-third of its more than 3,000 students would not successfully complete their studies.
To improve this number, staff focused on first-time students because, per Faulker, “if we don’t see a student succeed in that very first semester … the likelihood of success for that student goes down dramatically thereafter.”
StudentTracker allowed Surry to quickly identify first-time students and track the impact of their efforts in key areas. The data informed their decision-making in areas such as:
- Student finance advice
- Student outreach
- Classroom instruction
Their approach helped decrease the non-success rate for all their students by 48%, including first-time students. Faulkner praised StudentTracker as the “unsung hero” of a lot of the improvement that Surry has seen in the past couple of years.
Learn more about Surry Community College’s StudentTracker use. Register to watch the “Discover First Time Students Through StudentTracker” recording.
Interested In Attending a Live Webinar?
There are a wide variety of live webinars available with more added regularly. Learn more and register for an upcoming webinar.
“If we don’t see a student succeed in that very first semester … the likelihood of success for that student goes down dramatically thereafter.”
Michael Faulkner
Executive Director of Institutional Research, Surry Community College