Transferring Institutions in Different Modalities: Lessons from Undergraduates Across Stages of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The broad-scale challenges that higher education undertook in response to the COVID-19 pandemic changed a great deal about the student experience. Ongoing throughout several semesters, those changes may have affected the ways that transfer students experienced transition to the 4-year university setting, with implications for student retention. Interviews with students who transferred from community colleges to a large research university at three different pandemic stages—in 2019, 2020, and 2021—reveal that some aspects of the transfer experience remained consistent, while others changed. Notably, students experienced university-level coursework as academically challenging regardless of its mode of delivery and reported finding a diversity of academic and social options at the university. Transferring into online coursework helped reduce the shock associated with large-enrollment classes and navigating a large campus. Students reported fewer issues overall with course delivery when taking solely online coursework. The paper closes with recommendations to increase transfer student retention.

Two observations, among others, are abundantly clear in the state of higher education when it comes to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The first is that universities are struggling to graduate the number of STEM-qualified students to fill growing labor force needs. The second is that community colleges present a relatively understudied opportunity to provide some of those students, an especially appealing opportunity given well-known issues with a lack of diversity among those university students currently in STEM fields (Bahr et al., 2017; Dowd, 2011; Zhang & Ozuna, 2015).

Yet the process of transferring from community colleges to 4-year institutions is frequently fraught. Students making that transfer may experience a phenomenon known as “transfer shock,” wherein they struggle to continue to achieve academic success at the same level they had previously achieved (Hills, 1965; Ivins et al., 2017). Coupled with social and logistical challenges involved with transfer, this academic shock is especially acute during students’ first semester, after which they either regain their academic footing or leave universities altogether (Ortagus & Hu, 2019). At the same time, many transfer students arrive at 4-year universities having built substantial transfer capital, or skills, habits, and practices that can help them succeed at universities, during their tenures at community colleges (Bottia et al., 2020; Laanan, 2007; Laanan et al., 2010; Packard et al., 2011; Starobin et al., 2016).

The COVID-19 pandemic caused far-reaching and abrupt changes to higher education, so it is not clear how the shift to online learning necessitated by the pandemic may have changed students’ experiences with transfer. There are reasons to believe that it would have exacerbated transfer students’ academic challenges, given the overall higher levels of stress and logistical challenges that people were facing and that frequently have an impact on student success (Aucejo et al., 2020; Browning et al., 2021; Camfield et al., 2021; Driessen et al., 2020; Gillis & Krull, 2020; Jaeger et al., 2021; Jaggars et al., 2021; Son et al., 2020; Supriya et al., 2021). Academic struggles with the shift to university-level courses may have been worsened with the move to online learning, especially for students accustomed to in-person education and who would otherwise not choose to be online learners. Students attending courses online might have struggled to make connections with university faculty and resources. Conversely, transfer students who had built substantial transfer capital might have been able to draw on stocks of resilience and knowledge in navigating changing environments that could have lessened the impact of the COVID-related changes.

Thus, qualitative data with three successive cohorts of students allows investigation into how their experiences with transfer from community colleges to a 4-year university differed when they were attending similar sets of courses in different modalities. The three cohorts attended their first semesters at the 4-year university under vastly different conditions, described below, introducing a quasiexperimental condition to the study. One of the cohorts completed their transfer before the beginning of the pandemic in the fall of 2019, the second transferred in the fall of 2020, and the third in the fall of 2021. Findings indicate that students experienced some similarities in the transfer experience, regardless of whether they were online or in-person, while there were also marked differences. Finally, policy recommendations for university personnel who are motivated to create a more transfer-receptive culture for the increasing numbers of students transferring from community colleges are included.

Literature Review

In their first semester at university, transfer students may undergo a type of culture shock, as they encounter a new social and academic environment. They frequently struggle to maintain a level of achievement commensurate with their performance in community college. In fact, there is a long-standing literature on the challenges associated with navigating new institutions and becoming accustomed to a new set of academic and social expectations (Hills, 1965; Thurmond, 2007). This first-semester drop in grades is known as “transfer shock” (Hills, 1965), a term that has been expanded to refer to other types of social and academic issues that may contribute to lower retention rates for transfer students (Rhine et al., 2000). These issues include both personal characteristics, such as marital or caregiving status and students’ age, and institutional factors like inconsistencies in advising across community colleges and universities, which may harm students’ progression toward degree completion (Rhine et al., 2000; Stewart & Martinello, 2012). Throughout this paper, the term “transfer shock” is used in the latter sense that refers to a myriad of challenges transfer students may experience in their first university semesters.

There is also a substantial variation across transfer students in the ways in which they experience the transfer process. Variation occurs by gender and ethnicity, students’ previous levels of academic success, age, involvement in campus organizations, and degree programs, among others (Glass & Harrington, 2002; Jackson & Laanan, 2015; Johnson, 2005; Laanan, 2007; Li, 2009). Given this variation, it is important to examine how the unprecedented level of change in higher education that came in response to the COVID pandemic affected students’ experiences with the transfer process.

More recently, there has been an increasing emphasis on community colleges as being sites at which students may build “transfer capital,” or skills that can increase their probability of academic success at 4-year institutions (Chen & Starobin, 2019; Laanan, 2007; Laanan et al., 2010; Lukszo & Hayes, 2020; Mobley & Brawner, 2019; Rosenberg, 2016; Starobin et al., 2016). Building on Becker's (1993) theory of human capital, Laanan et al. (2010) conceptualized transfer capital as consisting of knowledge that allows students to navigate the transfer process successfully, including “understanding credit-transfer agreements between colleges, grade requirements for admission into a desired major, and course prerequisites” (p. 177). Universities also play an important role in building a transfer-receptive/affirming culture in which transfer students might thrive (Castro & Cortez, 2017; Handel, 2011a, 2011b; Jain et al., 2020; Jackson & Laanan, 2015; Packard et al., 2011; Wood & Moore, 2015). When universities do not build these cultures, there are lower retention rates for transfer students, especially those transferring into STEM majors (Jackson & Laanan, 2015; National Academy of Engineering & National Research Council, 2005).

Layered on top of the question about transfer experiences is the impact of the pandemic, which caused far-reaching transformations throughout students’ lives. Students, especially low-income students, experienced many other dislocations, including those to their work lives and fears for the health of themselves and others, as many of them were frontline workers. In the early days of the pandemic in 2020, university students around the world reported a variety of issues from the shift to emergency remote instruction, including loss of on-campus housing and employment, unreliable internet service or access to laptops, delayed graduation plans, greater levels of anxiety, mental health struggles, increased withdrawals, and suboptimal instruction that had not been designed for online learning (Aucejo et al., 2020; Browning et al., 2021; Camfield et al., 2021; Cannon et al., 2022; Charles et al., 2021; Driessen et al., 2020; Gillis & Krull, 2020; Jaeger et al., 2021; Jaggars et al., 2021; Son et al., 2020; Supriya et al., 2021).

Low-income students were especially likely to struggle in the Spring of 2020, in part due to their lower access to the technology needed for education, difficulty accessing quiet environments conducive to learning, increased family-care responsibilities (especially for women), and increased stress levels regarding societal disruptions that affected almost every aspect of their lives. Their academic outcomes were markedly more affected than those of higher-income students (Barnum & Bryan, 2020; Brown et al., 2022; Gelles et al., 2020; Gillis & Krull, 2020; Jaeger et al., 2021; Jaggars et al., 2021; Means & Neisler, 2020; Rodríguez-Planas, 2022a; 2022b; Supriya et al., 2021).

Coupled with a decrease in opportunities to interact with other students and faculty that especially affected low-income students (Supriya et al., 2021), there is a reason to believe that transfer students, who tend to be lower-income than students who begin their postsecondary education at 4-year institutions, may have disproportionately felt the effects of COVID-related changes to instruction. Yet the evidence is mixed as to whether transfer students, specifically, experienced worse academic outcomes during the shift to online instruction (Metzgar, 2021; Rodríguez-Planas, 2022a, 2022b; Selsby & Bundy, 2021), as well as how that shift affected students’ achievement and course completion overall (Aucejo et al., 2020; Bird et al., 2022; Engelhardt et al., 2021; Gonzalez et al., 2020; Rodríguez-Planas, 2022a; 2022b; Selsby & Bundy, 2021).

There may also be reasons to believe that students majoring in STEM fields like biology would have been especially affected by the shift to online education, given the requirements of lab courses. Many biology majors show a strong preference for hands-on learning and may therefore have experienced a loss of motivation resulting from the removal of in-person lab opportunities (Camfield et al., 2021; Driessen et al., 2020; Supriya et al., 2021). Thus, interview accounts with students who transferred from community college across three different stages of the pandemic to investigate how the elements of transfer shock differed in those stages are important to support student persistence.

Most of the prior work on the effects of COVID on students’ experiences in higher education uses data from Spring 2020, when universities shifted abruptly from in-person to online instruction (e.g., Aucejo et al., 2020; Bird et al., 2022; Cannon et al., 2022; Jaggars et al., 2021; Metzgar, 2021; Rodríguez-Planas 2022a, 2022b; Supriya et al., 2021; but see Kofoed et al., 2021 for an exception). This time span provides an incomplete snapshot of pandemic experiences, as disruptions and adjustments to instruction continued for several semesters at most universities. The effects of the pandemic on faculty work satisfaction continued long after the shift to emergency remote teaching (Marchiondo et al., 2022), so it is plausible that the influences on students’ experiences have a similarly far-reaching impact. At the same time, online learning—delivered when instructors have had time to prepare that coursework—may eliminate or reduce some of the logistical challenges that are involved in transferring to a 4-year university.

The massive upheaval of the shift to emergency remote instruction in Spring 2020 was followed by ongoing shifts in higher education that included a greater reliance on online coursework throughout the 2020–2021 school year. Universities made different decisions regarding whether to bring students back to campus and the extent to which they offered in-person or online courses. Some universities attempted to return to in-person coursework, only to find that COVID isolation facilities quickly ran out of capacity and quickly moved again to all-online coursework in the midst of the semester, necessitating other changes in the course schedule. At the university in this study, while the plan for Fall 2020 shifted several times over the course of the summer, once the semester began, it did not change again. In subsequent semesters after Fall 2020, as described below, university leaders announced plans for instruction well in advance of the semester and did not change them dramatically.

This study uses Pascarella's (1985) model of student learning and cognitive development as its foundation. As Pascarella articulates, there are five elements that directly and indirectly affect student learning, including their precollege academic experiences, their interactions with institutional agents, the effort they put into their education, the structure of the schools they are attending, and the broader institutional environment. Given the large-scale changes in the institutional environment, aspects of the structure of education, and interactions with institutional agents that students experienced throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, it is worthwhile to examine how those changes had an impact on transfer experiences. Conceptualizing transfer students’ success as retention in higher education, as Hagedorn et al. (Hagedorn & Cepeda, 2010; Hagedorn et al., 2006) do, emphasizes the importance of focusing on lessons learned from transfer students’ experiences, especially under extremely stressful circumstances.

Data and Methods

Study Site and Data Collection Efforts

All students involved were enrolled at a midsize urban 4-year research university located in the Southeast. The university is a regional institution with a high acceptance rate and a large contingent of transfer students, who regularly make up 40% or more of the student body. Notably, the university is in a state with extensive and detailed centralized articulation agreements between universities and community colleges, which lead to a relatively smooth process of credit transfer. The students in this study were all majoring in the biological sciences and were participants in a National Science Foundation-funded S-STEM program, aimed at supporting high-achieving students with unmet financial need. Students had earned associate of science (A.S.) degrees from community colleges to qualify for the program and came from several different community colleges, all located in the same state as the university. This S-STEM program is a multipronged effort designed to ease transfer into the 4-year degree program through increased advising, cohort-building activities, and provision of scholarship money up to $10,000 per academic year. Over the course of the project, three cohorts of students transferred to the university in question, at varying stages of the pandemic described below.

Data collection efforts as part of this program included brief surveys and in-depth interviews, conducted yearly, as well as access to students’ academic records. In this paper, surveys and interviews with the three cohorts who transferred to the university in the 2019–2020 academic year (early pandemic), 2020–2021 (height of the pandemic), and 2021–2022 (late pandemic) were analyzed. During their first semester, students completed online surveys designed to elicit information regarding some basic demographics, as well as their confidence in math and science coursework. Following completion of the surveys, students participated in semistructured interviews, which ranged from 30 to 60 minutes in length, with topics covering interest in science and how it developed, previous classroom experiences in community colleges and high school, and the nature of the transfer experience. By necessity, after the pandemic began, some of the interview probes concerned the effects of the shift to remote instruction and other aspects of the pandemic on students’ educational trajectories and experiences. Several questions on the interview protocol focused on students’ comparisons of their academic and social experiences at community colleges and at the university, with follow-ups designed to elicit information about the mixture of in-person and online courses students were taking. Program staff also had access to student academic records to verify information about in-person and online course-taking. All interviews were conducted via phone or Zoom and were recorded and transcribed for analysis. Interviews were transcribed verbatim, either by AI or by human transcribers. Members of the program staff checked the accuracy of and edited those transcribed using AI. The Institutional Review Board (IRB) approved all aspects of the research efforts.

Pandemic Stages

Students in the three cohorts studied in this paper transferred under very different conditions. The first cohort, which began studying at the university during the fall of 2019 or spring of 2020, did so under prepandemic conditions. There were eight students in the first cohort. All their coursework was held in person, and the university had no restrictions on in-person gatherings, so the program team was able to meet individually and in groups with the cohort members regularly. This cohort was enrolled in most of their coursework together and experienced the upheaval of the rapid transition to emergency remote education in the spring of 2020 in common ways. After that shift began in mid-March, their online coursework was primarily held synchronously, as professors in the natural sciences attempted to translate their in-person experience as directly as possible to the online environment. A change in university policy allowed students to request their letter grades be changed to pass/no credit after the semester concluded, solely for the Spring 2020 semester. Notably, none of the students in this cohort were living on campus, so none experienced an upheaval in their living arrangements due to the shutdown of the university campus. This cohort is termed the “early pandemic” cohort and denoted as “C1” in the quotes below.

The second cohort of eight students began studying at the university during the fall of 2020. Through a quirk of chance and in contrast to the first cohort, some of the students from the second cohort had not completed the chemistry sequence necessary to enroll in upper-division biology courses, so their class enrollment was not as consistent across the group as that of the first cohort. In the summer of 2020, the university mandated that all Fall classes, except for those aimed at first-time-in-college students, be held online. No in-person gatherings outside of those courses were allowed. Again, most of the students’ online courses and lab sections in biology and chemistry were held synchronously (physics labs were asynchronous). The spring semester of 2021 was characterized by a slight increase in in-person coursework, but members of the second cohort still had a large majority of their coursework online. In the 2020–2021 school year, the campus was largely empty and quiet, with none of the informal gatherings and social activities that marked the beginning of the 2019–2020 school year. University policy allowed all students to elect pass/no credit options on up to three courses during the entire 2020–2021 academic year, with a maximum of two courses per semester. This cohort is the “height of the pandemic” cohort and referred to as “C2” in the quotes.

During the fall of 2021, which was touted as being a “return to normal,” students and faculty gradually returned to campus, albeit fully masked. Classrooms were booked at full capacity. This third cohort had experienced the better part of three semesters at community colleges taking solely online classes. When they transferred, most of the university classes in which the 2021 cohort of five students were enrolled were held in person, although some classes were still fully online or held in a hybrid arrangement where students only attended in-person class once per week. ¹ Like the second cohort, several members of the third cohort had not completed prerequisite coursework that would allow them to enroll in upper-division biology courses together, which limited the degree to which students could enroll in the same coursework. The university allowed outdoor gatherings at the beginning of the fall semester, with a return to allowing in-person gatherings occurring later in the fall of 2021, followed by a lifting of the mask mandate in the spring of 2022. Policies with respect to electing to change letter grades to pass/no credit were rescinded. This is the “late pandemic” cohort, with the designation of “C3” in the quotes below.

Analytic Approach

The analysis below relies on thematic coding of the in-depth interview transcripts that uses a combined deductive and inductive approach. Although the research team ² approached coding with some themes in mind, other themes were allowed to emerge from the transcripts. For instance, it was anticipated that students would mention academic struggles when discussing the transition to the 4-year university. Students’ discussions about physical access to campus, the increased diversity of opportunity at the 4-year university, and the nature of online coursework were unanticipated. Once a general coding scheme was developed, program staff read the interviews and discussed themes found in the interviews, while taking detailed notes during the discussion. Following these discussions, members of the research team applied those codes to the interviews and coded all transcripts to agreement. Here, those themes are discussed to highlight the similarities and differences in student experience across the three stages of the pandemic.

Among the themes were academic struggles with the content and pace of university coursework, decreased connections with faculty at the university, and an increase in the academic opportunities and resources they experienced at the university. Many of the coded responses came when students were asked, “in general, how is the experience of being at [the four-year university] different from being at your community college?” Interviewers had scheduled probes for both academic and social experiences and explicitly followed up through the course of the interview if students seemed to be making an implicit comparison between the two types of institutions. For the content and pace code, any time students mentioned difficulty they were experiencing in keeping up with the coursework, the need to work independently, or anything regarding what they described as the “rigor” of the work, it was coded as “content and pace.” Students also drew comparisons between their experiences in creating faculty connections. Here, anything mentioned in terms of getting in touch with faculty members, knowing faculty members, or establishing social ties with faculty members was coded as “decreased connections with faculty,” ³ as almost all these mentions were in a negative direction, with students discovering they had fewer opportunities to connect with faculty at the university. In contrast, students mentioned resources and academic opportunities that they newly found at the university. Here, any mention of a university-provided resource such as peer tutoring or review sessions, as well as the types of courses available, both inside and outside of STEM, was coded as “increased academic opportunities.” One thing that students discussed most frequently was the chance to work on research projects with faculty in their labs, placements that the scholarship program in which they were participating facilitated but did not require.

The research team also coded for campus size and physical access to campus, increased class size, and difficulties students mentioned with course delivery. When attending class in person, many students mentioned logistical difficulties in navigating the campus. Anything discussed in this regard about parking or navigating from one place to the other on campus was coded as “campus size and physical access to campus.” Students also regularly noted the fact that their classes had more students than at community colleges: here, any mention of class enrollment, whether in lecture or lab section, was coded as “increased class size.” Finally, students also cited other issues with course delivery, aside from the pace, rigor, and independence required to succeed in the courses. Here, a lack of synchronization between labs and lectures, reduced homework expectations, and a lack of attendance requirement qualified as “course format–difficulty with course delivery.” Students did not mention these differences as net positives in their transfer to the university: at best, they were neutral comments, and they were more commonly noted as problems experienced after transferring to the university.

Findings

Table 1 shows some basic demographic information about the interview respondents. Biological science is a STEM field that has achieved gender parity, at least among undergraduate students, at the national level (National Science Foundation, 2019). At the university in question, 66% of undergraduate students majoring in that field are women. Even considering the overrepresentation of women among biology majors, the group of students participating in the scholarship program is disproportionately female: this may be due to several factors, including network effects in recruiting and the fact that the program participants are selected based on their high achievement: female students consistently earn higher GPAs than male students (Juszkiewicz, 2015; Wolfle & Williams, 2014). Table 1 shows that the cohorts are diverse with respect to race and ethnicity, with White students making up 50–60% of each cohort. This is somewhat less racially/ethnically diverse than the group of students majoring in the field at the university overall. The first two cohorts also have an average age above that of a “typical” college student, while the third cohort included students who were more typically college-aged.

Table 1.

Student Demographic and Academic Performance by Cohort.

	2019–2020 (n  =  8)	2020–2021 (n  =  8)	2021–2022 (n  =  5)
Racial group	50% non-White, 50% White	50% non-White, 50% White	40% non-White, 60% White
Gender	100% women	75% women, 25% men	80% women, 20% men
Average age	22.5	25.75	20.2
Community college GPA	3.58	3.63	3.78
1st semester university GPA	3.34	3.45	3.27
2nd semester university GPA	3.54	3.56	3.75

Similarities Across Cohorts

Regardless of the pandemic stage at which they transferred to the university, students recounted similar academic struggles with the content and pace of their university coursework, reported decreased connections with faculty, and described a diversity of academic opportunities that they had not had at community colleges. Some of these aspects of their experiences are emblematic of a type of transfer shock that challenged them in their first semesters, while other aspects helped to increase their motivation and enthusiasm for their chosen field of study.

As Table 1 indicates, all three cohorts experienced a drop in their GPAs from community college to their first semester at the university. For the first two cohorts, the decreases in GPA were relatively small, while the third cohort experienced the largest decline in GPA. Given the small size of this cohort, one outlying student's struggles had a large impact on the size of the decline. It is also possible that this cohort indeed found the transition to the university the most jarring, as they had experienced solely online education at community college for more than an academic year before transferring into an environment where they were primarily taking in-person classes. Thus, they were managing multiple transitions in a way that previous cohorts had not done. Table 1 also indicates that all three cohorts experienced a rebound in their GPAs in the second semester, as they adjusted better to the university context. For the first two cohorts, the size of the GPA rebound is due, in part, to their usage of the university's expanded pass/no credit options for grading, described elsewhere in this paper. In those two cohorts, most students took advantage of one or two elections of a pass/no pass grade in their second semesters.

Academic Struggles with Content and Pace

Students had similar academic adjustments in all three years, regardless of whether they were attending courses in person or online. In fact, every student interviewed across all 3 years mentioned this theme. Students repeatedly talked about their perception that university courses required more independent work than their community college courses, are delivered at a faster pace, and are overall more difficult than the courses they took in community college. Some noted that they were unsure whether the differences were due to the transition from community college to the university or whether they were artifacts of their jump from lower-division to upper-division coursework. A quote from a member of the early pandemic cohort (C1) was illustrative of the theme that university courses required more independent work. In her words,

The biggest difference I’ve noticed is there is more responsibility on us as students to fill in the gaps. So here at [the four-year university], our professors convey the material that they want, but there's also material left in the textbook, or from whatever else that they've been teaching us that we're responsible for learning and understanding. (C1)

A student in the height of the pandemic cohort (C2) talked about their perception of the unrelenting pace of instruction at the university. As she said,

at [the university], the instructor moves at a very, very fast pace. It's very easy to fall behind, even if you just miss one day. I had to really be on top of my game; otherwise, I [would] fall behind and it was very hard. (C2)

These discussions of the differences in pace and content carried through to the cohort that began studying at the 4-year university in the late stages of the pandemic (C3). When asked how their university courses differed from those they had taken at the community college, one replied:

They are a lot harder; there's more rigor. The curriculum itself is definitely more challenging, there have been times where I have been overwhelmed by the amount of information that's been presented to me…But I would say that the courses here at [four-year university] are definitely harder. (C3)

She was not the only member of the cohort to feel that the courses were harder, as another member of the same cohort described the university courses as being “more serious,” because they were more “fast-paced…and just a little more challenging than the ones at” their community college. This student went on to say that “it feels like now I’m actually at university,” in contrast to her experience at community college. The fact that these perceptions of differences in content and pace were consistent across the three cohorts, regardless of their experiences with online vs. in-person instruction at community colleges and the 4-year university, suggests that they were independent of course delivery method.

Decreased Connection with Faculty

Students also described having fewer opportunities to connect with faculty or a decreased sense of connection with them after transferring to the university. This was a prevalent theme, with most students mentioning this aspect of the transition from community college to 4-year institutions, across all pandemic stages. As one member of the late pandemic cohort (C3) noted:

You don’t really have as close of a relationship with some of the instructors as you would with a smaller class because I guess they have a harder time giving everyone the same amount of attention, because one person can only help so many people at a time. Emails too, it takes longer for instructors to respond and they don’t really know you that well, you have to kind of put yourself out there to establish a relationship. (C3)

This student explicitly mentioned class size as a barrier that kept him from developing a closer relationship with his professors, as did a member of the early pandemic cohort (C1), who said,

I feel like it's harder to get ahold of the instructor or the professors. Like at my community college, it was easier just to go up to them and talk to them. But here, you know, you have to kind of wait in line with all the other students that have questions for the instructors after class. (C1)

Students typically thought their instructors were still high-quality but found their experiences to lack the personal feel they had at community college. They talked about how it was difficult both to know their professors and be known by their professors because of the class sizes. In an introductory natural science course, one student in the late pandemic cohort (C3) described how being one of 200 students meant that he was not “able to develop a relationship on a first-name basis with [his] instructor” as he had been able to do at community college.

In describing the contrast between her connections with community college and university faculty, another student in the early pandemic cohort (C1) encapsulated what it meant to interact with faculty whom she perceived to care about her. In her words:

They [community college professors] didn’t just ask about my studies, they would ask about my son…It was not just that I was another person in their class. They acted like they were invested in where I was going in the future. Or I wasn’t another number or another person in a seat. (C1)

After she transferred to the university, she found it more difficult to establish those kinds of relationships with her professors where they knew enough about her to know that she had a son and to inquire about him or where she felt the same level of caring about her future.

Increased Academic Opportunities

Even transferring at the height of the pandemic, students in the C2 cohort mentioned the increased academic opportunities to which they had access at the university. Across all pandemic stages, students discussed the prospect of joining a research lab as a benefit of studying at the university. As one student in the late pandemic cohort (C3) distinguished between participation in a research lab and labs linked to classes, he looked forward to working on “something that [he] want[s] to research,” rather than the “tedious labs over and over again” that he was doing as part of his coursework. This student noted and appreciated the higher level of challenge that was coming with his coursework at the university.

Other students talked about other resources available at the university, such as peer-led mentoring and review sessions, which had continued to be available to students even when the university was primarily operating online. Across cohorts, students mentioned workshops on study skills and writing skills, tutoring, and other more informal learning activities that they did not get at community colleges as being important supports to their academic success.

Accounts from students who were in the latter two cohorts (C2 and C3) were largely consistent with those of students who had begun studying at the university prior to the pandemic (C1). These students described how the university had provided academic opportunities that allowed them to consider possibilities they had not previously known about. For instance, one student from the C1 cohort was developing a specialty in forensic biology, which was something she had not considered before transferring to the university. There, she found a “broad range of classes” that “really opened up my mind.” She went on to say, of forensics, “that's something that I never even thought about as being interesting,” but was happy to be pursuing. Indeed, the diversity of available course options, both inside and outside of the biological sciences, was attractive to students, as they were able to pursue concentrations within the major, as well as minors in other fields.

Differences Across Cohorts

Campus Size and Physical Access to Campus

As students transferred to the university at different stages of the pandemic, the nature of the social and logistical challenges differed dramatically. In years when they were attending classes in person, students frequently referred to the size of the campus and the challenges associated with parking as being intimidating and as hampering their sense of belonging. Most of them had attended relatively small community colleges where parking was freely available directly outside of classroom buildings. However, because there are thousands of students commuting to this university on any given day, finding a parking spot can sometimes be a source of stress, especially coupled with the lengthy commutes that many of the students made to get to campus.

Those students who attended class in person frequently mentioned general issues regarding campus size and physical access to campus. A quote from a member of the prepandemic cohort (C1) was emblematic of this approach, as she said, “it was hard to adjust to the distance between one class and the other one.” Another member of the prepandemic cohort (C1) stated, “I was moreso scared of the campus because the campus is huge. I know this sounds crazy, but I pull up Google maps on my phone anytime I’m there. And it walks me to the building that I need to go to.” These comments from students show how they experienced the physical size of the campus as somewhat alienating, especially in comparison with the smaller community colleges they had all attended. Because the students in the height of the pandemic C2 cohort were not attending in-person classes, they did not mention parking or navigational challenges at all.

In fact, the size of the campus and difficulties with parking were frequently the first thing that students attending in-person classes mentioned when asked explicitly to draw a comparison between being a student at the university and at their community colleges. In the late pandemic stage C3 cohort, when students were primarily in in-person classes, the discussion of the intimidation inherent in having a large campus came back to the forefront. One member of this cohort said, “I will definitely say that [the four-year institution] is a lot bigger. Everything is just…quadrupled from when I was at community college.” None of these students spoke about the larger physical size of the university, or the challenges inherent in navigating a physically larger space, in a positive way. Instead, they discussed how the size was something that made it “difficult to adjust,” or “overwhelmed,” or “scared” them.

Increased Class Size

Another prominent difference across cohorts lays in the ways that they spoke about the increased class sizes they experienced at the university. Before the pandemic, all members of the cohort commented in some way on the increases in class sizes they found after transferring from community colleges. One student, noting that “the most they always had was 20 students in the class” at her community college, said that she “now definitely [had] much larger classes, especially my organic [chemistry].” That class had an enrollment of about 60 students, which is relatively small by the standards of introductory coursework at the university. Another student talked about the “learning curve” that came with “having so many people in your classes,” which she had characterized as “huge.”

These frustrations with class size also trickled into students’ lab experiences in the prepandemic C1 cohort. Several students described their frustrations with large groups in labs, especially in courses where the lab skills would directly translate into the labor market. As one member of this cohort described her lab experiences:

The groups were so big. So you had at least five people in a group trying to work on one thing. Well, when most of the steps are, like, adding a few milliliters of something or a couple drops of something. And you have five people trying to either huddle around and watch, or one person's doing everything. It just wasn’t effective…The groups were so big, you didn’t even know what was happening…And now that I’m [working] in a lab, those are some of those skills that they’re asking me to reproduce, which I should have at least been exposed to before. And I don’t know what's happening. I’m having to learn it on my own. (C1)

Meanwhile, the second cohort of students who transferred at the height of the pandemic, when all classes were online, did not experience the increased class size in the same way. Although they understood that the classes they were taking had larger enrollments than the classes they had taken at community colleges, they did not note the increased class size as negatives when asked about their transition to the university. Instead, comments like the following were relatively common among members of the cohort who transferred and took all online courses:

But with online classes, I don’t really notice it as much because I’m mostly focused on the instructor, not really looking at everybody else. So I'm mostly just focused on learning the material and just being there. I’m not really seated in a room, you know, I could obviously look around and see, there's a lot of people around me. But when you’re on a Zoom call, you're mostly focused on an instructor and everyone else. You’re not really, you’re not going to be scrolling through looking at everybody quite as much. You might do it every once in a while…But you don’t really notice that as much when you're in a class unless it's harder to get ahold of the instructor. (C2)

Another student from the C2 cohort found that, although there was a marked change in the size of the classes he was taking, from enrollments of 10–15 in community college to larger university courses, that increased class size did not have a meaningful impact on his experience in online classes:

They [class size] feel like they’re small because you’re really just looking at the teacher or you’re really just hearing the teachers. So it's hard to, I guess kind of grasp how many people are really in the class. I guess it feels almost like a one-on-one setting online then like if they had an in-person class… I think it might be overwhelming in a class that has almost a hundred people or 70 people like in-person because at community college I only had, I think the most was like 10, 15 students. So I think that would have definitely been a change if I was in person. Just the sheer amount of people that…would be there. (C2)

While this perspective was not universal, the fact that some students did not note the change of class size as a difference between their community college and university experiences was important. When transferring from community colleges and taking in-person classes, every student mentioned the increase in class size as a marked difference in their experiences and one that no one mentioned as a net positive. The fact that it was less noticeable in online classes is notable. Not a single student across all the cohorts experienced a decrease in class size, nor had courses that were of similar size to those they had taken at community colleges.

Class Format: Difficulty with Course Delivery

There were also some counterintuitive findings about difficulty with course delivery. A priori, it was expected that cohorts that began studying online would experience bumpier transitions with regard to the delivery of courses. In contrast, the two cohorts that began at the university primarily in-person mentioned more issues, while the cohort that started their coursework almost entirely online did not mention anything other than the fast pace of the courses mentioned above and the necessity of learning a new learning management system.

Meanwhile, the other two cohorts had very different things to say about their course delivery. Importantly, the fact that the labs and lectures were not synchronized in the same way that they had been in community colleges was a stumbling block for many students. These students primarily described themselves as hands-on learners and had relied on labs to deepen their understanding of course concepts while they were enrolled at community college. As one student described it, the labs and the lectures at her community college had been “perfectly in tune.” Because the labs and lectures did not build on one another in the same way at the university, students struggled with what they perceived as a deficit to reinforce concepts from the lectures in a hands-on way. This student said, “hands-on is where…the connection is supposed to happen. Like you’re actually hands-on doing the things that you learned about. And I’ve always enjoyed the lab setting, but I did not get that experience at all with the [course] lab” at the 4-year university. In doing so, students have described a structural problem, driven by the fact that simultaneous enrollment in labs and lectures is recommended for students, but not required, so it is difficult for natural science departments to sync labs and lectures perfectly.

Students also mentioned some challenges in adjusting to the fact that attendance was no longer required in many of their science classes and that there was little homework assigned. One member of the late pandemic C3 cohort marveled at the fact that “in all of my science classes, half the class doesn’t show up anymore.” That same person went on to talk about the lack of homework assignments, which left them “studying on [their] own,” and feeling as if they wanted some homework to get “a little bit of guidance as to what to do, or what [they] needed to know.” Homework also served the purpose of motivating students to study and several discussed the fact that, while the lack of homework offered some schedule flexibility, it also required students to be more self-motivated to do the assigned reading and study without homework deadlines.

Conclusions

Even though many community colleges offer opportunities for students to build transfer capital on which they can rely when they begin to attend universities, many students continue to experience a transfer shock when they transfer, especially to institutions that struggle to provide a “transfer-receptive culture” (Jain et al., 2020). This shock is frequently marked by a drop in their grades earned and challenges in establishing a sense of belonging, as academic and social integration prove somewhat difficult. Yet it is not clear how the wide-scale changes brought to higher education during the COVID-19 pandemic may have affected this phenomenon. This study examined how the experience of transfer differed across three cohorts of students, transferring at different pandemic stages and in different university operating conditions. As such, it offers some insight into the primary drivers of the transfer shock phenomenon, as well as lessons for universities—especially larger universities—that might seek to ease transitions.

At most, if not all, universities, the shift to remote emergency instruction was fraught with problems. For the students in this study's first cohort, the timing of the shift was not as problematic as it might have been if it had occurred during their first semester, as they had started to establish the patterns and habits of university students. By the time the second cohort enrolled in the fall semester of 2020, most instructors had had an opportunity to undergo some type of professional development and learn what worked well in the online environment. Thus, the second cohort experienced a vastly different transition to the university than the first cohort, which had been solely in-person in the fall semester of 2019. Their experiences differed in turn from those of the third cohort, who had attended community college classes online, and then transitioned to the university in primarily in-person or hybrid conditions in the fall of 2021.

Consistent with some prior research, results reveal that several aspects of the university experience contributed to transfer shock (Glass & Harrington, 2002; Jackson & Laanan, 2015; Johnson, 2005; Laanan, 2007; Li, 2009). These included the pace of instruction, feeling a decreased connection with faculty, and feeling overwhelmed with the size of the campus and the size of the classes. At the same time, some of those elements occurred across modalities of attendance, while others were more pronounced in the in-person environment. In short, while online-only education was expected to be somewhat disastrous for the students who transferred during the fall of 2020, this was not unequivocally the case. There were, in fact, elements of the online experience that served to ease the transition to the 4-year university. Here, findings and discussion of the implications for universities that seek to smooth transfer pathways for community college students ensue.

Judging from the interviews with these transfer students, faculty concerns about the translation of in-person courses to the online environment and whether students would be exposed to a similar level of academic challenge seem to have been largely unfounded. Regardless of the modality of the university courses they were taking, students mentioned the increased pace and “rigor” of those courses, in comparison to the community college courses they had taken. Learning expectations that included a greater emphasis on independent learning appear to have been translated from the in-person into the online environment. Unfortunately, the decreased sense of connection that students feel with university faculty also appears to be consistent, regardless of course modality. Indeed, it is notable that attending courses online does not appear to exacerbate this sense of disconnection with faculty. In a more positive vein, students mentioned the increased academic opportunities to which they had access at the university as aspects of their transfer experiences. These academic opportunities included workshops in areas such as study skills and time management, as well as the chance to work in faculty labs on research. Again, there were substantial concerns across the university about how and whether some of those opportunities would translate into the online environment: students’ accounts suggest that they did so at least moderately successfully.

At the same time, there were marked differences in how students discussed their transfer experiences based on the primary modality in which they were attending courses. When attending in-person courses, the logistics of accessing campus are frequently mentioned as a hurdle to overcome in becoming comfortable on a college campus. Students talked about the size of the campus and the difficulty of navigating from one building to another in discussing the comparison. In fact, this point is usually the very first thing that they mention when asked to compare their experiences at community college and the 4-year university. For obvious reasons, when students were in online courses, they did not struggle with this aspect of transfer.

Students also experienced increases in class size differently when they were in in-person and in online coursework. In their interviews, they point out that their community college classes tend to have enrollments of fewer than 20 students, while many of their university courses have well more than 70 students. In the online environment, most of the students did not find the increased class sizes to be as alienating as they find them in the in-person environment. While they recognized the fact that there were many more students enrolled in their university courses, the increased class size did not diminish the degree of comfort with which they were navigating their classes in the same way that the large enrollment did in face-to-face classes.

These findings translate into some policy recommendations for universities that are concerned about student transfer experiences. First, it would be helpful for such universities to host transfer-specific (and perhaps major-specific) orientation sessions that involve detailed instructions about navigating campuses, including parking recommendations. Campus tours showing where common classroom buildings are located, as well as student resources such as the student union, library, and locations for informal learning activities, would also help to increase students’ sense of belonging on campus. On large campuses, these tours would be better suited to specific majors and, in small enough groups, might be tailored to helping students find the specific buildings and classrooms where their courses are scheduled. Providing campus ambassadors or guides during the first week of class might also help students to navigate unfamiliar terrain: having current students stationed at various places around campus in identifiable clothing would help transfer students, along with first-time-in-college and perhaps even returning students, find their destinations.

Second, universities might consider providing at least one small-enrollment course for transfer students in their first semester or provide online options for at least some of their large-enrollment major-specific courses. A small course might be a one-credit-hour transfer success course or an introductory course in the major. This recommendation requires resources that cash-strapped public universities may find difficult to muster, but such a course could provide students with an environment that is more familiar to them than the larger courses they will be taking. Offering an online option for large-enrollment courses may not have the same detrimental effect on university budgets, although might face some opposition from faculty unconvinced of the comparability of the online learning environment.

Third, those universities looking to create a more welcoming environment for transfer students could implement a more wide-reaching usage of pass/fail options for transfer students in their first semesters. Given the general increase in expectations of university coursework that students reported across all modalities, adjusting grading options to allow transfer students to opt for more pass/fail options in their first semesters could help to decrease the drop in GPA that many students otherwise experience. As Rodríguez-Planas (2022a) finds, flexible grading policies implemented in the Spring of 2020 were “able to counteract negative shocks, especially among the most disadvantaged students” (p. 10). As universities attempt to integrate transfer students into their student bodies, they should include increased access to pass/fail options.

In the event that universities face another similar viral outbreak in the future, there are lessons here to draw on as well. Providing training and support for faculty who need to teach online courses is crucial. If possible, maintaining opportunities for some face-to-face activities, including work in labs, helps to keep students motivated, even when their coursework may be held online. As mentioned above, flexible grading policies can help to lessen the impact of stressful shocks to students’ academic and nonacademic lives. Finally, especially in the early days of an outbreak before screen fatigue sets in, translating in-person informal learning resources to an online experience helps many students, especially transfer students adjusting to 4-year universities.

Like all studies, this one has limitations. The COVID-19 pandemic is known to have decreased enrollment in community colleges overall, as well as altered students’ enrollment pathways (Fishman & Nguyen, 2021, Huie et al., 2021). The students present in the latter two cohorts of this study are those that persevered through the shift to online instruction at community colleges and chose to transfer despite the shocks that the pandemic was introducing into their academic pathways. Therefore, they are a group selected for their persistence in the face of far-reaching adversity, which is already the case for low-income students who transfer to 4-year universities at the best of times. While there are always concerns regarding the generalizability of qualitative work, the specificity and complexity of the experiences presented here move the literature forward in understanding transfer students’ experiences, as called for by Laanan and Jain (2016). While there are no doubt aspects of their transfer experiences that are peculiar to the university in question in both positive and negative directions, the accounts that the students give of their first years of university instruction are consistent with some previous accounts (Laanan et al., 2010; Mobley & Brawner, 2019; Packard et al., 2011). Future research should also examine the long-term university experiences of students who transferred at different pandemic stages, as well as the implications of transferring after experiencing different modalities of instruction during community college careers.

In sum, the changes that many universities made in response to the COVID-19 pandemic substantially altered some aspects of the transfer student experience for students transferring from community colleges. Those experiences have been found to be challenging, in a body of work stretching back decades (e.g., Hills, 1965; Laanan et al., 2010; Mobley & Brawner, 2019). While some portions of the phenomenon of transfer experience, such as expectations of increased independence in learning and decreased connections with faculty members, stayed consistent across learning modalities, others, such as challenges with logistics and the ways in which students experienced larger class sizes, changed.

Author Biography

Elizabeth Stearns is professor of Sociology and Public Policy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where she also directs the Public Policy doctoral program. She holds a PhD and MA in Sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research interests focus on the interplay of organization and individual characteristics and how they predict student success, primarily in higher education contexts.