Declining Numbers of "Upward" Transfers

Predictions about the future of higher education are never in short supply. One problem with predictions is that we rarely (if ever) go back and score them for accuracy.

In August of 2020, we predicted that transfer activity between colleges would increase in the ensuing years as students figured out how the pandemic and their own finances would impact their plans.

This prediction was based on years of data. We looked back at other event-based disruptions in college enrollments (e.g., The Great Recession of the late 2000s) and saw large increases in transfer enrollments in the years during and after an event.

We expected the same would happen during the pandemic...and we were wrong.

Not only has transfer enrollment not grown, but it has actually declined quite a bit. During the past two years, transfer activity dropped among both "continuing transfers" (i.e., people who transfer directly from one college to another with no break in between) and "returning transfers" (i.e., people who stopped out for some length of time).

The reason for this drop goes back to the source: community college enrollments. Enrollment across the nation's community colleges declined by 13 percent between 2020 and 2022, thereby narrowing the pool of people eligible to transfer "upwards" to a four-year university.

This goes to show just how different the pandemic has been from other disruptions. Its impacts on enrollment continue to ripple in new and often discouraging ways.

There's no telling how much community college enrollment will rebound (and therefore when we can expect transfer activity to increase again), but logic tells us that things will normalize again to some degree. And when that happens, four-year colleges and universities will need smoother and and more student-friendly transfer pathways than they've had in the past.