“To Make This Leap”: Understanding Relationships That Support Community College Students’ Transfer Journeys

The Importance of Socially Supportive Relationships in College

A large body of research has confirmed the importance of positive relationships with faculty and staff on undergraduate students’ journeys to enrollment and through degree completion (Cole & Griffin, 2013; Guzzardo et al., 2021). These relationships have been explored through the lens of mentoring (Crisp et al., 2017), institutional agents (Chen & Starobin, 2019; Museus & Neville, 2012), and cultural navigators (Strayhorn, 2015). Through these relationships, faculty and staff guide, coach, and mentor students; they also share valuable information about how the institution operates and how to navigate the bureaucracies and unique culture of an institution.

Much of the scholarship that explores peer relationships as a source of social support for college students builds on Tinto’s (1993) influential (yet justly critiqued) work on student departure and social integration. Social support is important for helping students feel like they belong and ultimately persist to graduation (Anistranski & Brown, 2023). Further, Tierney and Venegas (2006) found “peers have the potential to create fictive kin networks, and in this role, peers become a social support that helps enable a culture of success” (p. 1687).

There is considerable variability among college students and the support they receive from their families as they pursue their bachelor’s degrees (Harper et al., 2012). Family emotional support has been associated with positive academic outcomes, particularly for low-income students (Roksa & Kinsley, 2019). Moreover, Strom and Savage (2014) demonstrated continuous support from family significantly impacts students’ commitment to their education and graduation.

The Importance of Socially Supportive Relationships in the Transfer Journey

Relationships with institutional, or transfer, agents at the community college and receiving institution serve as resources to help facilitate the transfer process (Bensimon & Dowd, 2009; Nuñez & Yoshimi, 2017; Sanchez & Morgan, 2022; Solis & Durán, 2022; Urias et al., 2017). Institutional agents provide support in various forms including psychosocial support, mentorship, and access to critical resources and information. As Ellis (2013) noted, “Successful transfer students find champions on every community college and university campus. . . . The students return to these champions to celebrate success and ask for assistance” (p. 83). Indeed, Moser (2013) found students with a faculty or staff mentor at the community college were better able to cope with challenges at the receiving institution.

Peers also play a key role in the vertical transfer journey. Transfer students rely on peer relationships for advice, information, and support in navigating the receiving institution (Bahr et al., 2013; Flaga, 2006; Lukszo & Hayes, 2020). Rodriguez and Kerrigan (2019) found that transfer students seek out connections to build coalitions and specifically recognize the knowledge native students hold about campus resources. Peer relationships are particularly important for minoritized transfer students (Lukszo & Hayes, 2020; Sanchez & Morgan, 2022; Urias et al., 2017), and transfer students want receiving institutions to actively facilitate development of peer relationships (Ellis, 2013).

Although the student experience is often conceptualized around two separate spheres—academic and social—a growing body of evidence suggests the intersection of these spheres is more relevant to transfer students’ lived experiences (Bahr et al., 2013). Transfer students’ interactions with other students are often centered around the academic aspects of the student experience (Ellis, 2013; Lester et al., 2013; Rodriguez & Kerrigan, 2019; Solis & Durán, 2022). Examples include activities connected to their major or career path, honors program, or activities hosted by their academic department.

Relatedly, transfer students may see significant overlap between their on- and off-campus lives. Schudde et al. (2021) highlighted transfer students’ use of “microsystems” to gather information from outside the institution about transfer, including family and friends who had personal experience with the transfer process. Other research confirms the importance of family support during the vertical transfer journey and while adjusting to the receiving institution (Flaga, 2006; Solis & Durán, 2022; Wang, 2020). Altogether, evidence regarding social support and the transfer student experience highlights the importance of relationships that span boundaries both within and outside of the institution.

Socially supportive relationships are critical because they provide social capital (Putnam, 2000), which ultimately builds momentum toward goal completion (which we address in the next section). However, inequities exist in social capital accumulation (Chen & Starobin, 2019); this has particular implications for students as they navigate the complexities of transfer. Chen and Starobin (2019) found that among community college students, higher levels of family social capital were positively associated with accessing college social capital through institutional agents. However, students whose parents had lower education levels had lower levels of family capital, demonstrating that forms of capital are interrelated and can amplify, or diminish, each other to reproduce privilege and inequity.

Social Capital

Higher education researchers have adopted social capital to explore the impacts of social ties and connections on the student experience (e.g., Chen & Starobin, 2019; Tierney & Venegas, 2006). These connections “have particular implications for higher education, where students often are actively building the social and professional networks that will shape their lives and careers” (Bahr et al., 2013, p. 492). Putnam (2000) distinguished between two types of social capital: bonding and bridging. Bonding social capital is inward looking, formed from homogenous in-group relationships and connections, and it most often provides emotional support. Bridging social capital is outward looking, formed from loose social connections and across social groups, and it most often provides instrumental support. However, Putnam noted these types of capital are not opposing but rather lie along a continuum.

Transfer Student Capital

Transfer student capital refers to the ways in which vertical transfer students acquire and use experiences, knowledge, and skills to assist in their transfer journeys (Laanan et al., 2010; Moser, 2013; Rosenberg, 2016). The Laanan-Transfer Students’ Questionnaire (L-TSQ) measures transfer student adjustment and transfer capital. The forms of acquired capital, and the L-TSQ, are framed around three concepts: (a) social demographic factors, (b) community college experiences, and (c) receiving-institution experiences (Laanan, 2004; Laanan et al., 2010; Moser, 2013). Scholars have examined the relationship between transfer capital and the ease of transition to the receiving institution, finding a positive correlation for improved student outcomes (e.g., Laanan et al., 2010; Rosenberg, 2016; Starobin et al., 2016). For example, Rosenberg (2016) concluded that accumulation of transfer capital had a significant effect on a student’s intent to transfer and even mitigated demographic characteristics that were negatively associated with intent to transfer. Lukszo and Hayes (2020) concluded that transfer capital accumulation helped to shape student expectations about transfer and subsequent planning and decision making.

Moser (2012, 2013) advocated expanding the L-TSQ to include nine new constructs for a deeper understanding of transfer capital, with a particular focus on the socialization of transfer students at the receiving institution. In testing her revised L-TSQ, Moser (2013) found “transfer student capital plays an important role in community college student success at the university” (p. 53), with success measured by university grade point average (GPA), student coping ability, and student satisfaction with the university. Relationships with faculty members at the community college and at the university were particularly important in predicting students’ ability to cope with problems encountered after their transition to the university. Recent scholarship using Moser’s expansion of the framework explores how students accumulate transfer capital. Jabbar et al. (2022) found that institutional practices (e.g., quality advising) combined with individual characteristics (e.g., socioeconomic status, family support, and social capital) shape student understandings of the transfer process. Lukszo and Hayes (2020) found that peers, family, and high schools were the top sources of transfer capital, and students used transfer capital to navigate the nuts and bolts of transfer, build self-efficacy, and regulate expectations of the receiving institution.

While Moser’s (2013) expanded transfer capital framework recognizes socially supportive relationships with institutional agents (e.g., faculty, advisors) and with classmates and friends at the receiving institution, it neglects forms of social support and capital external to institutions. Therefore, the conceptual framework for this study integrates Putnam’s (2000) forms of social capital (bonding and bridging) with eight of the transfer capital constructs that focus on social support from Moser’s (2013) expanded transfer capital framework (faculty mentoring at the community college, formal collaboration with faculty at the community college, faculty validation at the community college, staff validation at the community college, academic advising experiences, experiences with faculty at the university, adjustment process: social, social support at the university). Table 1 defines each of these eight forms of transfer capital as operationalized for our analyses, which we detail in the next section. Furthermore, we have chosen to use a qualitative approach to discover how socially supportive relationships, both within and outside the institution, serve as sources of support for transfer students.

Research Sites

Participant recruitment took place at the four partner institutions collaborating on the grant project. The university enrolls a substantial percentage of transfer students (vertical and lateral) each year, representing over 20% of total first-time enrollments. The three community colleges had varying institutional profiles, including location (one urban, one rural, and one suburban), enrollment (ranging from approximately 9,000 to 45,000), and university transfer rates (ranging from approximately 10% to 30%).

Data Collection

We chose to recruit participants at various stages of their vertical transfer journeys, including pretransfer students (i.e., those still attending community college) and post-transfer students (i.e., those who had successfully completed the vertical transfer process). Our reasoning was that while post-transfer students would be able to speak to the full experience of vertical transfer, they might also experience hindsight bias or not recall earlier experiences along their journeys as clearly as pretransfer students.

To recruit post-transfer students, we emailed all currently enrolled students at the university who transferred from any Ohio community college inviting them to participate in a focus group. We held three focus groups in spring 2020 and two in fall 2020, for a total of 24 post-transfer participants. In spring 2021, we worked with institutional contacts at the three partner community colleges to invite students interested in transferring to the university to participate in a focus group. We held two focus groups with a total of five pretransfer participants. Due to difficulty recruiting pretransfer students for focus groups, we received IRB approval to conduct individual interviews and conducted four in spring 2022. All nine pretransfer participants attended one partner community college; we were unsuccessful in recruiting participants from the other two institutions. Due to the timing of data collection, none of the post-transfer students would have experienced the expanded resources and structural supports provided by the larger project at the time of their participation. The pretransfer students may have experienced some of the resources and supports instituted in the early phases of the larger project (e.g., dedicated transfer advising, degree pathways, online resources) by the time of their participation, but these would have been newly established, and indeed only a handful of participants mentioned knowing about or utilizing them.

In total, we conducted seven focus groups and four individual interviews with 33 participants. Each focus group ranged in size from two to nine participants. The first focus group took place in person prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic; it was audio recorded and transcribed by a member of the research team. The remaining six focus groups and four interviews were conducted, recorded, and transcribed using Zoom. Each participant received a $10 Amazon gift card. Of the 33 participants, 69% identified as female, 28% as male, and 3% as nonbinary; 69% identified as white, 28% as students of Color, and 3% as biracial;1 50% were aged 18–22, 38% were 23–39, and 13% were 40 or older; 47% were Pell Grant eligible, 41% were not eligible, and 13% were unsure of their eligibility; and 28% were first-generation students. Table 2 presents selected demographic characteristics for each of the 33 participants.

Nationally, among students who transferred from a two-year to a four-year institution in spring 2022, 45% identified as white, 6.4% as Asian, 13.3% as Black, 19.7% as Latinx, and 15.5% as “other” (including Native American, Pacific Islander, multirace, nonresident alien, and unknown/missing); 58% identified as female and 40% as male; and by age, 24.4% were 18–20, 33.2% were 21–24, 16.3% were 25–29, and 26.0% were 30 or older (National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, 2022a). This dataset does not include pretransfer students nor post-transfer students who transferred prior to spring 2022, so we cannot directly compare with the demographics of our sample; however, those who identify as female and white may have been overrepresented among our participants. National data are not available documenting the representation of first-generation and Pell-eligible students among the vertical transfer population. However, first-generation students are more likely than their continuing-generation peers to begin their postsecondary education at a public two-year institution (Postsecondary National Policy Institute, 2022), and “of those who began postsecondary education at a community college in fall 2015, lower-income students were nearly half as likely than their higher-income peers to have transferred to a four-year institution (25% vs. 41%)” (National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, 2022b, para. 3).

The semistructured focus groups and interviews asked participants to reflect on their knowledge, use, and need of supports (both academic and nonacademic) at the community college and receiving institution as well as their overall transfer experience. Sample questions included “How did you utilize academic advisors during the transfer process, and what has your advising experience been like?,” “What aspects of your transfer experience have been positive [negative]?,” and “Talk about the academic and nonacademic supports you relied on during the transfer process.” We used the same set of questions for every focus group and interview, adapting the wording of questions where necessary for the pretransfer participants (e.g., “What interests you about transferring to [the university] to complete your bachelor’s degree?” versus “Tell us about your decision to transfer to [the university] to complete your bachelor’s degree.”). We also administered a demographic survey to participants and requested consent to collect institutional student data (e.g., GPA, major).

1 The demographic survey from which this information is drawn allowed participants to respond freely to these questions rather than providing them with preselected categorical options. This table reports participants’ verbatim responses.

2 Stella did not complete a demographic survey.

Data Analysis

All analyses were conducted by the research team, consisting of one faculty member and two graduate assistants. To provide insight into the research question—how relationships both within and outside of their institutions support students’ vertical transfer journeys—the research team coded transcript data using our conceptual framework. We created 11 codes, following MacQueen and colleagues’ (2008) guidance for team codebook development: two codes drawn from Putnam’s (2000) forms of social capital (bonding and bridging), eight social support-related constructs from Moser’s (2013) expanded transfer capital framework, and one open code we developed to capture social support outside the institution, a concept not reflected in the transfer capital framework. Each team member was assigned a subset of the 11 codes from our conceptual framework and applied these codes to the focus group and interview transcript data. The research team then met to share coding and resolve disagreements in code application. Table 1 provides codebook definitions and the number of coded excerpts for each of the 11 codes.

Trustworthiness

A component of trustworthiness in qualitative research involves sharing the researchers’ positionality to enable readers to understand the perspective from which they designed the study and interpreted the data (Jones et al., 2006; Merriam, 2002). The first author, a fulltime PhD student, has served in a variety of roles focused on student success in higher education prior to returning to the classroom as a student and research assistant. As a first-generation student and scholar, she recognizes relationships as key to helping her navigate the academy, and part of her research agenda explores the impact of relationships in higher education. The second author is a faculty member in a higher education administration program and served as Principal Investigator of the larger, grant-funded project as well as the lead member of the research team. One strand of her research agenda examines the experiences of underserved and minoritized populations along their educational and career trajectories, and her research seeks to inform educational practice that advances higher education’s role in promoting social justice and equity within U.S. society. The third author, a fulltime higher education professional, returned to academia after years of working in international education. She is interested in questions of equity and access, particularly around where academic institutions can better understand and serve their underrepresented students.

Having a research team in which each member brought a unique perspective relative to the topic helped to enhance the trustworthiness of this study, and the team took steps throughout the study design and data analysis processes to challenge each other’s assumptions; for example, our objective in discussing coding disagreements was not coming to consensus but rather to share and test our individual interpretations of the data, seeking alternate interpretations in the interest of credibility (Merriam, 2002). An additional step we took to enhance trustworthiness included sharing findings from the focus groups with scholars and educators who work with vertical transfer students (e.g., through conference presentations and draft written summaries). This feedback indicated that what focus group participants shared about their vertical transfer experiences was congruent with existing scholarship and educators’ first-hand experiences, bolstering credibility of our findings (Bowen, 2005). Our extensive use of participant quotes in presenting the findings also enhances trustworthiness by providing direct excerpts from the data rather than merely our researcher interpretations (Jones et al., 2006).

Limitations

There are several limitations of this study. First, we collected our data amid the substantial disruption to higher education caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, participants’ experiences are in some ways unique to this time period—notably the difficulty some reported in making social connections at the university. Nonetheless, given the amplified mental health challenges college students overall have reported since the pandemic’s onset (Center for Postsecondary Research, 2021), as well as the likely continued disruptions to higher education’s “normal” operations for the years to come, we believe our bottom-line findings regarding the critical importance of social connections and capital for transfer students are transferable to the postpandemic era.

Second, we had difficulty recruiting students to participate in focus groups at two of our three partner community colleges, possibly due to the increased challenges and bandwidth demands students were experiencing during these semesters (Center for Postsecondary Research, 2021). Although we adapted our approach with pretransfer students in spring 2022, the experiences of pretransfer students are underrepresented in this study, and the nine pretransfer participants were all enrolled at the same community college.

Finally, we recognize that the findings reported here largely represent the experiences of “survivors”—students who successfully transferred from a community college to a four-year institution (24 of the 33 participants). We had hoped to include in our study community college students who had reported an intent to transfer to the university but did not; however, the three community colleges were unable to share contact information for former students meeting this criterion due to data limitations and privacy concerns. Yet, capturing the experiences of students who are unsuccessful in their vertical transfer attempts is as—if not more—important in painting a full picture of the needs of transfer students to inform policies and practices to support them more effectively.

Socially Supportive Relationships Within the Institution

The transfer capital framework (Laanan, 2004; Moser, 2013) privileges socially supportive relationships within the sending and receiving institutions. These relationships include faculty, staff, and peers. First, we share our findings regarding socially supportive relationships with faculty at the community college. Then we share our findings regarding staff (with particular attention toward academic advising) at the community college and then the receiving institution. This is followed by findings regarding participant experiences with faculty at the university. Finally, we conclude with findings regarding the role of peers in social adjustment at the university.

Socially Supportive Relationships Outside the Institution

The experiences reported by the participants in our study highlight how peers, faculty, and staff play a role in facilitating vertical transfer students’ journeys by providing social support and capital (bonding, bridging, and transfer). Many participants also shared examples of receiving social support and capital from relationships outside of the institution. Despite their importance to participants’ transfer journeys, these extra-institutional relationships are not captured within the transfer capital framework; thus, we developed this additional code to capture these relationships, and 29 transcript excerpts received this code. Next, we discuss how these relationships served as bonding and bridging capital to support participants’ transfer journeys.