Transfer students face a unique set of challenges when trying to get acclimated to their new environment. In the current transfer literature, there is an absence of career development in all its forms including career resources, career advising, career coaching/counseling, professional readiness, and job search strategizing. Ensuring Success for Students Who Transfer: The Importance of Career and Professional Development works to fill this void. This publication presents anecdotal and data-driven evidence of career development and professional readiness being infused at various universities to offset the imperceptible career voice in current transfer literature.

Published in partnership with the National Institute for the Study of Transfer Students. Analysis of bachelor’s degree completion suggests that only about a third of college graduates attend a single institution from start to finish. More than one quarter earn college credits from three or more schools before completing a degree. For most, these student-defined pathways lead to increased time-to-degree and higher costs. Many will simply drop out long before crossing the finish line. Ensuring college completion and success requires an understanding of the evolving nature of transfer transitions and a system-wide approach that reaches beyond two-year and four-year institutions to include high schools participating in dual enrollment programs and military college initiatives. A new edited collection offers insight into institutional and statewide partnerships that create clearly defined pathways to college graduation and career success for all students.

America's institutions of higher education have been challenged to develop new strategies to improve the success of all students. With more and more students attending multiple institutions, improving the transfer process is key to ensuring all students succeed. AAC&U launched the Quality Collaboratives (QC) project in 2011 with support from Lumina Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in order to find ways to make transfer between institutions easier and more efficient and, more importantly, to make students' achievement of important learning outcomes, as measured by authentic assessments, the central metric that should guide transfer. Lumina's recently developed Degree Qualifications Profile (DQP) was an important tool in this larger movement away from credits as proxies for student learning toward a system in which genuine proficiency is the measure of student progress and success. The DQP is a framework describing the essential learning outcomes that both employers and faculty claim as critical for college graduates and the levels of achievement on these outcomes that students should be able to demonstrate at the associate, baccalaureate, and master's degree levels (see page 22, below). As part of AAC&U's Liberal Education and America's Promise (LEAP) signature initiative to ensure that all college students in the United States receive a liberal education, the QC project brought together twenty campuses and nine state university systems or state higher education commissions to collaborate and develop models that placed assessment of student learning at the center of the transfer process. This brief folio along with its more in-depth companion volume, "Collaboration for Student Transfer: A Nationwide Degree Qualifications Profile Experiment," describe ways to refocus student transfer on demonstrated student learning proficiencies as a primary basis for transfer student success. It is designed to help institutions interested in building successful cross-institutional collaborations to use the DQP to develop new approaches to advancing transfer student success and to assessing student learning. It begins with a flow chart that summarizes the main components of the successful cross-institutional collaborations that were developed by the QC institutions. The folio then charts key action steps in the process flow chart and lessons learned by these institutions through their implementation of these kinds of collaborative projects. [For a related report, see ED569339.].

"Teaches libraries to realistically support transfer student success by ensuring that students have essential information literacy skills"--

Co-published with At last there is a handbook that everyone in higher education can use to help increase transfer student success. This comprehensive resource has been brought together to meet the need for a truly holistic approach to the transfer experience. The book brings together research, theory, practical applications, programmatic illustrations, case studies, encouragement, and inspiration, and is supplemented by an online compendium for continual updates of resources, case studies, and new developments in the world of transfer.Based on a totally different way of thinking about, understanding, and acting to increase transfer student success, The Transfer Experience goes far beyond the traditional, limited view of transfer as a technical process simply about articulating credits, a stage of student development, or a novel enrollment management strategy. Rather, the book introduces a stimulating array of new perspectives, resources, options, models, and recommendations for addressing the many needs of this huge cohort – making the academic, civic, and social justice cases for improving transfer at both transfer-sending and transfer-receiving institutions.

The transfer function is well positioned to address a number of compelling problems facing higher education in America. Transfer serves families by providing an affordable avenue to higher education while minimizing the impact of crippling loan debt. It serves the public at large by leveraging scarce state resources over the long-term. And it provides a path to higher education for students who might not otherwise have access to it. However, none of these outcomes will be realized unless we improve the transfer process. Although community colleges can and do provide a more affordable avenue to the baccalaureate, the transfer process has remained convoluted, complicated, and complex. Our most vulnerable students begin their postsecondary education at a community college, yet these students are often the least equipped to navigate the frequently choppy waters of transfer in the middle of their undergraduate career. The three broad categories of this book address some of the most pressing issues by focusing on key aspects of the transfer process: strategic planning, curricular innovations and initiatives, and outreach and advising. Many of the articles recognize that transfer is a shifting landscape, and the most imaginative promising practices now emphasize deep collaboration, and shared implementation over the long-term. All of the practices shared evoke a general movement away from transactional gestures towards the building of genuine relational connections with transfer students. This book highlights the experience of practitioners involved in the day-to-day work of serving students in a variety of institutional contexts: public and private, two-year and four-year. The authors hail from institutions around the country, as well as foundations and organizations that are devoted to the important work of improving American higher education. Their insight-often culled from years of experience-provides a set of strategies that will be useful to two- and four-year institution faculty and staff who are interested in improving the transfer process. In addition, this publication will inform policymakers who are grappling with state and national higher education issues and who seek new ideas about closing the achievement gap and increasing higher education completion rates.

Transfer Students in Higher Education presents what we know about transfer students, addresses assumptions and myths about the transfer experience, and explores the changing demographics of this student group. Adopting a student-centered approach, the monograph offers strategies to begin (and continue) the work of serving students and creating transfer-friendly campus environments. Chapter authors explore the issue from the perspective of both sending and receiving institutions and provide research, case studies, and best practices to help institutions meet the challenges of enrollment, orientation, advisement, retention, and graduation of transfer students.