Track 2: An Exploration of Challenges and Self-Adjustment Experiences of Community College Transfer Students in Engineering

This project will explore how students who transfer from community colleges into engineering programs at four-year universities (known as "vertical transfer students") experience and navigate the challenges of transitioning into a new academic environment. These students play a vital role in meeting national goals to strengthen the need for a highly skilled engineering workforce, as they often bring varied life experiences, educational backgrounds, and pathways into the field. Despite this potential, many transfer students face obstacles that can disrupt their academic progress, including unfamiliar institutional systems, academic pressure, and a loss of social or advising support networks. This research will investigate the strategies students use to manage these stressors and persist toward an engineering degree. The project aligns with the goals of NSF’s Engineering Education programs by generating evidence-based insights to improve retention and student success, particularly among those following nontraditional pathways into the engineering profession such as U.S. Veterans. The findings will support ongoing efforts to expand access to high-quality engineering education and to strengthen the U.S. workforce through more receptive and flexible educational pathways. This project will examine the psychosocial stressors and self-adjustment strategies of vertical transfer students enrolled in engineering programs at a research-intensive university. Guided by the Phenomenological Variant of Ecological Systems Theory (PVEST), the study will analyze how individual experiences, identities, and environmental factors influence students’ persistence over time. The research will address three primary questions: (1) How do engineering transfer students describe their self-adjustment experiences in response to psychosocial stressors? (2) What is the relationship between student characteristics and academic success outcomes? (3) How do levels of vulnerability affect persistence and outcomes across varied student subgroups? The study will use a concurrent mixed methods design that combines longitudinal qualitative data, collected through interviews and Photovoice reflections, with 20 years of de-identified institutional data on academic outcomes. This integrated approach will enable the team to explore both the complexity and commonality of student adjustment trajectories. Approximately 30–35 students will be followed across five academic semesters, with participant recruitment and data interpretation supported by college advisors and a research advisory board. The project will produce theory-driven insights and practical recommendations to inform institutional policies and practices. Findings will be disseminated through peer-reviewed publications, presentations, and an open-access toolkit designed to support faculty, advisors, and practitioners working with transfer students in engineering. The project will also contribute to future research infrastructure by laying the groundwork for a national collaborative focused on supporting vertical transfer pathways in STEM. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.