The Board of Regents explored the current state of the University of Wisconsin System transfer programs and sought ways to improve the transition at their meeting Thursday.
At the meeting held on the UW-Green Bay campus, UW System President Kevin Reilly said it is becoming increasingly common for students to continue their careers in higher education at a different university or institution than the one they started at.
He said it has been the role of the UW System to provide students considering transferring to another institution with the necessary tools to do so with confidence and ease.
“Students demand flexibility and transparency to facilitate easier transfer, and our institutions have programs and systems in place to help them achieve their educational goals when they do transfer,” Reilly said.
Last year, Reilly said, the University of Wisconsin had the second highest amount of students coming in from other institutions, with 1,671 transfer students, trailing UW-Milwaukee, who had 2,424.
Over 17,000 students transferred into a UW college or institution last year, Reilly said.
Eighty-seven percent of these students who transferred to a UW institution or school last year, or nearly 15,000 students, were new transfer students, Reilly said, meaning they had not previously enrolled at the institution or school they were transferring to.
While the UW System has seen an increase in transfer students over the last decade, Mark Nook, interim senior vice president for academic affairs at the UW System, said the rate of transfer students to no transfer students has remained relatively flat, with about 30 percent of incoming students arriving as transfer students.
The percent of transfer students at each school varies dramatically, Nook said, with 20 percent of incoming students at some schools being transfer students and over 50 percent for others. Regardless, Nook said, each individual school must provide adequate programs and resources for students who desire to transfer.
“We can’t ignore the transfer students. We have to have programs in place to make transfer effective, and we do,” Nook said.
One of the programs at the disposal of transfer students is the Transfer Information System, which allows students currently enrolled in a UW school to see how their credits would transfer if they enrolled in a different UW institution, Lynn Freeman, TIS training and outreach consultant for UW System, said.
Freeman said TIS is developing a program which will allow students to see how their credits would fit into a given major of the institution they seek to transfer to.
When compiling data and research on retention levels, Nook said UW schools should not focus so much on the percentage of students who will come in as transfer students, but rather on the percent of their graduates who are transfer students, which is around 31 percent.
Reilly said overall the UW System has provided excellent transfer options to students interested in switching institutions, but said the System must always be focused on finding ways to better the programs.
“Our success in transfer [programs] has been due […] to 40 years of consistent attention and continuous improvement in processes and programs that help transfer students,” Reilly said.
