During the 1980's, two landmark transfer projects were funded by the Ford Foundation. The Urban Community College Transfer Opportunities Program (UCC/TOP) aspired to increase the number of minority students transferring to and succeeding at four-year institutions. Many of the practical strategies developed during participating colleges, such as…

The Partnership Grant Program of the National Center for Academic Achievement and Transfer awards grants to partnerships of two- and four-year institutions to strengthen transfer, especially for low-income, Black, and Hispanic students. It also awards Core Curriculum grants to two-year/four-year partnerships which focus exclusively on curriculum…

In 1990, the National Center for Academic Achievement and Transfer awarded partnership grants to 13 pairs of two- and four-year institutions to strengthen transfer education through attention to academic practices. The grant program was open to institutions located in the 50 largest cities in the United States. To be eligible, two-year schools…

To date, community colleges have used two major approaches to manage transfer and assist students with a successful transfer experience: a "student service" approach, concentrating on counseling, advising, catalog information exchange, and other student affairs functions; and a "document" model, relying on articulation agreements, course…

Inconsistencies in the definition of transfer from two-year to four-year institutions and in the calculation of the transfer rate have given rise to incongruous findings. For example, one researcher in 1989 reported a transfer rate of less than 12% for the colleges in Illinois at the same time that the Chancellor's Office of the California…

In September 1992, a small group of experienced researchers met to identify areas of research and specific research hypotheses to guide further inquiry into transfer. Specifically, participants examined transfer as it relates to institutional mission, institutional organization, and access to education and identified various premises upon which…

In 1991, a national survey was conducted of transfer practices at both two- and four-year institutions. The survey was sent for the second time to two-year public and private institutions (n=1,350), and for the first time to four-year institutions (n=1,950). The two-year college response rate was 39% in 1990 and 31% in 1991, while the response…

In an effort to standardize the definition of the two-year college student transfer rate and to collect national transfer data, the Center for the Study of Community Colleges (CSCC) has solicited data annually since 1989 from a sample of 240 public and private two-year colleges nationwide. The CSCC has standardized the definition of "transfer…

A small number of studies conducted during the 1980's provide insights into the magnitude of transfer activity and the characteristics of students who are likely to transfer. The studies, based occasionally on state data and more frequently on secondary analyses of the U.S. Department of Education's longitudinal databases, reveal that: (1)…

Financial incentives are an important and vastly underutilized means of improving the rate at which two-year college students transfer to four-year institutions. The increased cost of tuition at a four-year institution can be a serious financial obstacle to the transfer student. One way to alleviate this might be to provide more financial aid to…