Voices from the Field: Transfer Professionals Speak
- NISTS Team
- 21h
- 7 min read
Updated: 6h
Written by
NISTS
At NISTS, we champion both transfer students and the individuals who support them. Last fall, we conducted a survey of transfer professionals (322) to identify future professional development needs. The responses were so powerful, especially related to the challenges transfer professionals face, that we wanted to share them with you.
Our goal in communicating these survey highlights is to validate the experiences of transfer professionals facing similar challenges, bring these issues into the open, and foster discussion. Supervisors can use this information to engage their teams about potential similar issues, acknowledge them, and collaboratively develop workarounds, supports, and, ideally, solutions. We recognize that there are no quick fixes for many of these challenges; however, making them visible can serve as a first step, ideally leading to positive change.
This post focuses on one specific survey question: “What are the top challenges you face in supporting transfer students?” Respondents were asked to select up to three categories from the list of options and to provide additional comments, if desired.
While this data offers valuable insights into the experiences of some transfer professionals, it was limited to our audience and is not intended to be generalized to all transfer professionals. Further information about the survey can be found at the end of this post.
Respondents not only selected their top three challenges in supporting transfer students, but they also took the time to write 76 additional comments. Clearly, they had a lot to say about the topic!
Three themes emerged from the respondents’ comments: 1) feeling understaffed and overworked, 2) observing a lack of equitable support for transfer students, and 3) experiencing these challenges as interrelated and overlapping.
Theme 1: Transfer professionals feel understaffed and overworked.
The top two challenges identified by respondents were “Managing high workloads” and “Inadequate staffing.” These issues clearly have a negative impact, as resources and staffing often struggle to keep pace with the increasing number of transfer students. This sentiment is further supported by the following quotes:
“The workloads are intense, and it will likely only get worse. This overlaps with staffing to a degree because many institutions, ours included, have had hardly any change to the size of these teams in the past 20+ years. Yet, we have more transfer students and more first-year students with transfer credit, and we are recruiting more broadly, so those credits are less likely to be locally earned and already built. The push for credit for prior learning will also increase this workload.”
“We are a small team with 1/3 of our campus students being transfer students. But we definitely do not have 1/3 of the resources. We need more help, but keep being denied. We are a 3 person office responsible for manual transcript evaluation and recruitment (community college visits and student programming).”
In other cases, respondents (5) described the pressure of being an “office of one.” These two examples stand out:
“I'm the first (and only) person dedicated to transfer work, and I'm new to this work. I have to do a lot of educating myself, then educating others.”
“I am an office of one, supporting roughly 900 students...it's a lot.”
One respondent expressed frustration at a lack of understanding of the necessary expertise and the complex nature of transfer work:
“The institution doesn't comprehend how much work goes into maintaining, tracking, [and] updating articulation agreements, then, as the same person, performing recruitment duties and recruiting students. They have the attitude that anyone can do it and it isn't a special skill set, or knowledge base.”
Respondents were aware of and desired to improve programming and processes,
but lacked the capacity to pursue their ideas:
“I have ideas for new initiatives (would LOVE to model NOVA's Achieve program) BUT I can't do it all.”
“We don't have enough staff to have the bandwidth to keep up with the workload, much less try to improve processes, so I think that is by far one of the biggest challenges.”
Connecting to the Bigger Picture
These quotes paint a picture of transfer professionals working hard just to get by day to day. Despite their desire to drive change and improvements, and even after identifying promising, replicable practices, they were constrained by heavy workloads and inadequate staffing. Underlying these comments is a sense of frustration and not feeling valued.
Our Pillars of the Transfer Student Experience and the upcoming CAS Standards for Transfer Student Programs and Services both highlight the need for sufficient institutional funding and staffing to effectively support transfer students. While many institutions are facing budgetary constraints, it is critical to fund this support or risk losing students and staff.
Theme 2: Transfer professionals see a lack of equitable support for transfer students compared to first-time-in-college students.
Respondents expanded on the “Lack of institutional support or priority” category, which was the third most frequently selected challenge. They described an overall lack of student-focused policies, and first-time-in-college (FTIC) students being prioritized over transfer students, as reflected in these quotes:
“Our university is very much geared toward traditional incoming freshmen, so transfer students often get lost in the shuffle and among leadership conversations.”
“My institution has few transfer policies that are focused on transfer support and success. The existing policies are focused on what the institution will or will not do. Not student-focused at all.”
“Transfer is generally not a priority broadly since a lot of our population that gets us funding are incoming first-year students.”
“We have no transfer culture at my school. There is no buy-in from faculty or most of my leadership. Transfer is an afterthought, an annoying task rather than an amazing opportunity.”
Even when transfer students made up a large part of the student population, there was still a lack of awareness and prioritization, as these quotes illustrate:
“[Our challenges include getting] buy-in and having executive leadership put [as much] focus on transfer as they do for FTIC [students]. Almost 50% of our undergraduate population are transfer students, at almost 35,000 students.”
“We have a difficult time motivating faculty, who own the curriculum, to prioritize this work in spite of the fact that new-entering transfer enrollment accounts for over 45% of new-entering enrollment.”
Respondents (6) also highlighted the lack of equitable financial aid and scholarships for transfer students.
“We no longer have a merit-based admissions scholarship for transfer students due to budget cuts.”
“My department is funded well enough, but I'd like to see more funding for students. Transfer scholarships are pathetic compared to freshman scholarships.”
“I would love for there to be more support structures for students so that work/life/financial aid/stress didn't get in students' way.”
Connecting to the Bigger Picture
Transfer professionals possess a unique understanding of the gaps in support that transfer students face, due to their close interaction with them. We advocate for these professionals to champion transfer students' needs and educate others about their value. However, this can be an exhausting endeavor if there's a persistent lack of awareness and prioritization of transfer students (especially when combined with feeling chronically overworked and understaffed). Our Pillars of the Transfer Student Experience emphasizes the importance of providing equitable support to transfer students, comparable to that offered to first-time-in-college students. We acknowledge this is an ongoing challenge, as most four-year institutions were not originally designed with transfer students in mind.
Theme 3: The challenges transfer professionals face are interrelated and overlapping.
Twelve respondents viewed the categories as interrelated and overlapping, with five indicating they could select "all" or "most" of them. Respondents also described causal relationships between the categories as evidenced by these quotes:
“Limited funding leads to inadequate staffing and data systems that would streamline processes.”
“Managing high workloads could be improved by replacing or improving inadequate data systems.”
“If you put lack of internal coordination together with institutional policy, that would be a big one for me- this causes poor choices in articulation agreements, complex policies, and a lack of student perspective all around.”
Connecting to the Bigger Picture
The challenges that transfer professionals face are connected, and there are ripple effects stemming from a lack of prioritization and funding that lead to understaffing and insufficient data systems. This interrelatedness also points to the frustration mentioned earlier: transfer professionals can see ways to improve processes but lack the bandwidth to take action.
Where to Go from Here
The transfer professionals surveyed face numerous challenges, many stemming from current institutional financial pressures related to recruitment and retention. Despite this, these professionals are uniquely positioned to improve recruiting and retention practices for this important group of students, if institutions leverage their expertise. At the same time, long-standing systemic issues are at work, like the fact that most institutions were not designed with transfer students in mind. While some institutions are adapting, others are slow to implement meaningful changes, often leaving transfer professionals caught in the middle.
We are grateful to all of the transfer professionals who completed the survey and shared their experiences by taking the time to write comments. Thank you!
Reflecting and Taking Action in Your Context
We hope this post will serve as a jumping-off point for teams to discuss whether these challenges ring true and, if so, acknowledge them and consider ways to address them. Here are a few reflection questions to consider.
Understanding the Challenges:
What is your initial reaction to the challenges presented?
Which of these challenges resonate most strongly with you or your team?
Finding Support and Documenting Experiences:
How can you support yourself or others facing these challenges? (Even small steps are valuable.)
What methods can you use to document the challenges you’re facing? How might you communicate this to others?
Taking Action:
Identify one aspect of your work environment that you have control over, however small.
What is one small, actionable step you plan to take after reading this post?
Survey Information
The survey referenced in this post was distributed by NISTS to our email list and through our LinkedIn and Facebook pages. The survey opened on October 31, 2024 and closed on November 14, 2024.
The purpose of the survey was to learn more about transfer professionals’ work and professional development needs. For this survey, we focused on needs and challenges rather than other areas, such as what was going well. We encourage others to build on this initial work and explore ways to capture a more holistic picture of transfer professionals’ experiences.
332 individuals responded to the survey, and 241 individuals responded to the question featured in this blog post.