Transfer Enrollment and Pathways
Fall 2024 Report
March 5, 2025
Despite ongoing recovery efforts to regain pre-pandemic normalcy for the higher education community, there are lingering COVID-19 impacts on transfer enrollment. In particular, community colleges were the most affected sector of higher education during the pandemic with unprecedented declines in freshmen, continuing student enrollments, adult learners, and transfer-in enrollments, which had a ripple effect on overall transfer enrollment across higher education sectors. In fall 2024, transfers into community colleges have surpassed fall 2020 levels but transfers from two-year to four-year institutions remain below early pandemic levels.
This report series was created to help educational leaders and policymakers address enduring enrollment impacts from the pandemic. It aims to better serve the education community with new, timely, and detailed data that are only available through the Clearinghouse. These include postsecondary participation and mobility among economically disadvantaged students. It also includes data on disparities in pandemic recovery across differing student and institutional characteristics.
This report was created with support from the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. The opinions expressed in this report are those of the authors and do not represent the views of the Institute or the U.S. Department of Education.
Highlights
- The number of students who transferred into a new institution in fall 2024 grew 4.4 percent compared to fall 2023. Transfers represented 13.1 percent of all continuing and returning undergraduates, up from 11.9 percent in fall 2020.
- Starting in fall 2023, returning transfer students have made up the majority of transfer enrollment due to higher growth rates for students transferring after returning from a stopout.
- Two-to-four-year transfer students account for the majority of transfer enrollment (41.7% in fall 2024). However, this pathway’s share of all transfer students declined 3.5 percentage points from fall 2020 to fall 2024 due to larger declines in two-to-four-year transfers at the start of the pandemic and a recovery that only started in fall 2023.
- Black and Hispanic students saw the largest increases in transfer enrollment (+8.3% and +4.4%), whereas White students were the only race/ethnicity group to see a decline in transfer enrollment in fall 2024 (-1.3%). The fall 2024 increase in Black and Hispanic student transfer enrollment and decline in White student transfer enrollment is also reflected among non-transfer students.
Download the Data Appendix (xlsx) and Methodological Notes (pdf).
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| Previous Reports |
|---|
| COVID-19: Transfer, Mobility, and Progress |
| First Two Years of the Pandemic |
| Transfer & Progress |
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