Transfer Students: Lessons Learned over 10 Years

This paper will summarize the accomplishments of an NSF sponsored S-STEM program for transfer students. This program had 97 students: 41.2% underrepresented minority, 28.9% female, and 60.8% either female and/or underrepresented minority. Therefore, this program overrepresented minority engineering and computer science students in the university by almost double and females by over 60%. All of the students had unmet financial need. The graduation rate of these students is over 95%. Of the students who have graduated, 50% have gone right on to graduate school, an amazing number given that nationally only about 20% of engineering students go directly to graduate school. The accomplishments of this group of students will be compared with the 76 students who went through the first transfer program in 2003-2008. A major difference is in the percentage of students going right on to graduate school. In the first C-SEMS programs, about 40% of the native students went right to graduate school and about 30% of the transfer students. While there are very good rates compared to students not in the scholarship program, these rate are quite a bit lower than the current 50% for transfer students. Program changes will be noted which may have been factors in the differences between the groups.