UTSA: Automating StudentTracker File Transfers for Better Reporting

Dec 10, 2024 | Learner Insights, NSCBlog

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.

Doug Shapiro, VP, Research and Executive Director, Research Center

"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:

UTSA: Automating StudentTracker File Transfers for Better Reporting

In a recent webinar, Shanna Sherwood, Institution Research Analyst at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), shared her team’s experience automating their StudentTracker for Colleges and Universities file transfer process and the benefits they realized.

Improving Data Quality and Processing Times

UTSA’s Institutional Research and Analysis (IR) team identified logistical challenges in their original StudentTracker file transfer process. Extra applications for manual data cleansing were required. Users also needed to log on to the Clearinghouse’s secure SFTP site for file retrieval, which was not accessible by some team members.

As a result, the team sought to automate their file transfer process. This included:

Using the Clearinghouse’s SFTP server with direct connections from IR servers to the Clearinghouse; and
Removing “manual” processing and the need for extra applications.

Not only did these changes make data accessible to more of IR, but it also made it easier for the team to connect Clearinghouse data sources to other data sources. Sherwood gave an example: “[IR] can join Clearinghouse data to census data, and we can get additional attributes about students that way.”

“Through all of this, we’ve experienced improved data quality and processing times, which I think has led to better reporting,” said Sherwood.

To learn more about UTSA IR’s StudentTracker file transfer process, including a visual walkthrough, watch our on-demand webinar, “How UTSA Automates StudentTracker File Transfers.”