2017 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Seattle University offers an undergraduate-only program focused on professional formation of each student. Small class sizes provide opportunities for individualized instruction and personal attention, while faculty-led advising helps students navigate the many options of our programs and encourage them to think about their future beyond the time spent at the university. 50% of our current students are transfers from 2- or 4-year institutions. Formal agreements between community colleges and universities in our state inform the transfer process and ensure that potential transfer students are aware of which courses they should be taking at the community college-level.

In this paper, we investigate the success of our transfer students as compared to freshmen. The hypothesis we test is: "When studying at an institution with high levels of support services, transfer students are no less academically successful than freshmen." We track students who majored in our program between years 2000 and 2015, and provide data about their successes as measured by the time to graduate, their major and cumulative GPAs, and their employment status after they graduate (if known). We contrast the success of transfer students with that of freshmen, and compare students across the 10 local community colleges. We also study the students’ preparation for the transfer process and how it differs depending on which 2-year institution they are coming from. We compare our findings to nationally available data.

It has been our experience that, typically, transfer students are more mature than first-year students and therefore more motivated. However, research also shows that many transfer students face academic, social, and/or psychological challenges leading to low GPAs in their first year of transferring. We believe that any recruitment strategy should start with analyzing the success and motivation of current students. Our exploration provided us with several approaches, which, we hope, should yield increased enrollment and improve the overall process of recruitment, admission, and first quarter advising. Finally, as expected, support services have a tremendous role in helping students be successful. We discuss some of the most common student support services and provide recommendations for optimizing their effectiveness.