Turning Postsecondary Student Transfer Data into Stronger Student Pathways

A new guidebook from the Strategic Data Project (SDP) and ResearchEd offers higher education practitioners evidence-informed practices for turning transfer data into stronger student pathways.

Approximately one-third of undergraduate students currently enrolled in college will transfer at least once during their academic career. As these pathways become increasingly common in higher education, practitioners must be equipped with the skills to identify, interpret, and act on transfer data to strengthen student progression.

A new guidebook from the Strategic Data Project (SDP) and ResearchEd, Beyond Transfer Rates: A Guidebook for Understanding Student Pathways and Progress , supports practitioners to move from insight to action as they explore transfer data. Organized around key guiding questions about transfer, the guidebook supports institutions to:

• Identify transfer trends and patterns using multiple sources of evidence.
• Interpret what transfer patterns reveal about students' educational pathways and institutional practice.
• Engage cross-functional partners in collaborative inquiry.
• Apply evidence-informed strategies to strengthen transfer pathways and student progression.
• Advance continuous institutional improvement centered on student success.

Building on Previous Work & The Value of The Postsecondary Data Partnership (PDP)

The new guidebook builds on previous analytic support tools from SDP and ResearchEd. In 2022, SDP released the SDP-CTE Diagnostic Toolkit, designed to help leaders at community and technical colleges use institution-level data to conduct inquiries into patterns of student success. 

In partnership with ResearchEd, that toolkit was extended in 2024 to include the integration of Postsecondary Data Partnership (PDP) data. Administered by the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC), the PDP is a voluntary data-sharing initiative that enables colleges to track educational pathways and outcomes over time and across institutional boundaries. Institutions participating in the PDP submit student-level enrollment, demographic, and course data, which NSC standardizes and links to national enrollment and completion records. The result is longitudinal, disaggregated data that allows institutions to see student progress and outcomes after transfer, something that colleges cannot easily do on their own. 

Post-transfer tracking in the PDP offers a similarly strong starting point for the new transfer guidebook, providing a foundation of evidence to identify who transfers, when, and where. On its own, however, PDP data is limited to identifying where patterns exist, not the conditions or structures that create them. In order to gain a more holistic understanding of student mobility, institutions need to draw on multiple evidence sources, which is only possible through collaborative inquiry.

Inside the Guidebook: Why Collaborative Inquiry Matters

Consider two different community colleges with nearly identical transfer rates. On paper, they look the same. But at one institution, the majority of these students are moving through a structured pathway defined by an articulation agreement, with credits that transfer cleanly and apply directly toward a destination program of study. At the other institution, students are often leaving before reaching key academic milestones, with low credit acceptance at destination schools. 

By looking at each institution's transfer rate alone, it would be easy to assume that similar institutional conditions and structures are influencing student movement. Only by drawing on multiple sources of evidence, can practitioners reveal the nuance that defines each of these stories. The guidebook is designed to support this type of analysis by encouraging users to frame inquiry around three complementary evidence lenses: 

• Student Movement: What is happening? Postsecondary Data Partnership (PDP) transfer data provide insight into patterns of student mobility and progression, including who transfers, when transfer occurs, transfer destinations, and post-transfer outcomes.
• Institutional Conditions: What structures and practices shape pathways? Institutional data provide depth and context about the policies, practices, and structures that influence students’ ability to navigate transfer pathways.
• Student Experiences and External Context: How do students experience pathways? Student experience data and external research help practitioners interpret transfer patterns and understand the broader conditions influencing student decisions. These sources may include belonging and engagement surveys, advising experiences, transfer intention data, focus groups, state and national datasets, and labor market information.

Transfer touches on many areas of an institution, which is why the guidebook is built to foster collaborative inquiry across roles rather than treat transfer as any single office's responsibility. For questions about transfer timing, for example, practitioners are guided toward a set of collaborative next steps: connect with advising and student success teams to determine if outreach and early alerts are reaching students at the right time, bring academic affairs and program faculty into a conversation about whether pathway timelines match how students are actually moving, and reach out to community partners who understand the barriers students face outside the institution's own data systems. 

In this way, each institutional office holds a piece of evidence that helps identify the broader picture of student progression. An enrollment leader might notice that transfer is concentrated among part-time students, while an advisor might see that those same students rarely make it to a planning appointment before they leave. A financial aid officer may reveal a wave of aid eligibility changes in the term before departure. None of those observations can individually tell the complete story, but brought together, they start to, and it is from there that coordinated action can be taken.

Where to Start

The guidebook does not ask that institutions start at page one and work through every question in order. It is designed so that practitioners can begin with whichever guiding questions are most relevant to their institution's current priorities, whether that means establishing a baseline understanding of who transfers, examining how well transfer pathways align with student goals, or exploring the experiences and academic momentum students build before they leave.

The full guidebook, Beyond Transfer Rates: A Guidebook for Understanding Student Pathways and Progress, is available on our website at https://sdp.cepr.harvard.edu/sdp-cte-diagnostic-toolkit.