The Untapped Potential of STEM Transfer Students

Community colleges can serve as a launchpad for expanding and diversifying the STEM workforce, but for students seeking a bachelor’s degree, navigating the transfer pathway can be challenging. Because STEM programs often require highly sequenced coursework and close coordination between institutions, students can encounter delays in transferring, credit loss and excess credits that ultimately hinder degree completion.

A new report from the Community College Research Center, drawing on National Student Clearinghouse data, examines the trajectories of community college transfer students who earned STEM bachelor’s degrees. The research draws on data from 1,965 four-year institutions and 919 community colleges, focusing on students who entered the four-year institutions in 2015–16 and completed a bachelor’s degree within six years.

The findings show that community college transfers contribute substantially to the STEM workforce, accounting for nearly 56,000 STEM bachelor’s graduates, or 15 percent of all STEM bachelor’s degree earners in the cohort studied. Despite these contributions, transfer students who earned bachelor’s degrees were less likely than their nontransfer peers to graduate in STEM fields: 17 percent compared with 23 percent.

Tatiana Velasco, senior research associate at the center and lead author of the report, said that while the six-percentage-point gap may appear relatively small, it represents a significant number of potential STEM graduates. The report estimates that an additional 18,400 community college transfer students could have earned STEM bachelor’s degrees if transfers accounted for the same share of STEM graduates as they do of non-STEM graduates.

“These are pretty notorious gaps that STEM students and transfer students seeking degrees in STEM are facing,” Velasco said. “The big takeaway is field-specific pathways to transfer matter a lot because the barriers and penalties that transfer students face can really compound for students in these highly sequenced programs.”

Barriers to STEM success: The report notes that community college transfers who earned STEM bachelor’s degrees faced a longer path to completion than those who graduated in non-STEM fields. Among these students, 16 percent completed their degrees within four years of starting community college, compared with 20 percent of transfer students who earned non-STEM bachelor’s degrees.

Although STEM transfer graduates spent less time at community colleges before transferring than their non-STEM peers—2.4 years compared with 2.7 years—they spent an average of 3.2 years at four-year institutions after transferring, compared with 2.8 years for non-STEM graduates.

Velasco said time to completion is a significant barrier for community college students pursuing STEM degrees, particularly when prerequisite courses are not properly credited after transfer.

“In STEM, you really need those prerequisites to be applied on time,” Velasco said. “If they arrive at the four-year institution and they are not getting those courses reviewed and applied on time, that student is at risk of not being able to continue taking the courses in the sequence in the fall when they arrive at the institution.”

She said delays in applying transfer credits can set students back a semester or even a year, particularly when required courses are offered only once annually. “Or in the worst-case scenario, they don’t get these credits applied and they have to start over,” she said.

The report also identified disparities among Black, Hispanic, low-income and female students. Black, Hispanic and low-income transfer students faced greater challenges completing STEM degrees on time, while women were the least likely to graduate in STEM fields. However, women who did earn STEM degrees experienced shorter times to completion and higher rates of graduate school enrollment.

Among community college transfer students who earned bachelor’s degrees, 13 percent of Black students, 14 percent of Hispanic students, 16 percent of low-income students and 10 percent of women graduated in STEM, compared with 17 percent of transfer graduates over all. Among those who earned STEM bachelor’s degrees, only 12 percent of Black students, 11 percent of Hispanic students and 14 percent of low-income students completed their degrees within four years of starting community college.

“This is true for transfer and nontransfer students, but for transfer students, there is a gap on top of that racial gap,” Velasco said. “These are already very driven students in terms of their characteristics, their motivations, their background … so this speaks a lot to the systemic issues that we see in transfer that are field-specific.”

Community college transfer students who earned STEM bachelor’s degrees were also less likely than their nontransfer peers to continue into graduate education, including graduate STEM programs. Among STEM bachelor’s completers in the cohort studied, 12 percent of community college transfers enrolled in graduate school in the year after graduation, compared with 17 percent of nontransfers. Just 5 percent of STEM transfer graduates enrolled specifically in STEM graduate programs, compared with 8 percent of nontransfer STEM graduates.

“We need to build a workforce that’s capable of conducting research, that’s capable of addressing difficult challenges in the world,” Velasco said. “And in order to do that, we need more people with graduate degrees, not only Ph.D. level but also master’s.”

A path forward: The report notes that the substantial variation in STEM transfer outcomes across states suggests that improvements are possible. Washington, for example, had strong outcomes across multiple measures, with a high representation of community college transfers among STEM bachelor’s graduates, one of the highest shares of STEM graduates among transfer completers and a relatively small gap in STEM degree attainment between transfer and nontransfer graduates. It had one of the highest rates of on-time completion.

California and Florida also performed well on several measures. California combined strong community college representation in STEM with relatively short time to bachelor’s completion after transfer, while Florida combined strong transfer representation with above-average graduate school enrollment among STEM transfer graduates.

Moving forward, Velasco said, one of the most important steps four-year institutions can take is to clearly map STEM prerequisites and course sequences and help transfer students enroll in the appropriate courses immediately after transferring, avoiding unnecessary delays.

“This is one of the key things that four-year institutions can do,” Velasco said. “But this requires a lot of willingness and intentionality and leadership on four-year institutions to create these pathways and bring faculty from both the four-year institution and the community college to the table to address this.”

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