ST. LOUIS – For many new students, the first-year college experience is an academic and social buffet, a dizzying array of activities and opportunities to herald the passage into adulthood. Not so for transfer students, a growing but largely neglected group whose needs are as varied as the circumstances that bring them to campus in the first place.
That’s starting to change. With more students opting to start their higher education at affordable community colleges and the stagnant economy sending even more late-blooming learners back to school, campus administrators find that catering to transfers and other nontraditional students makes sense.
With an average student age of 27 and more than 75 percent of its 12,500 undergraduates starting their college careers elsewhere, the University of Missouri-St. Louis is one of the most prominent transfer-heavy schools around. The school offers transfers a student union study lounge and resource center, peer mentors to help ease their transition and an honor society specifically for them.
“It’s the perfect school to go back to in my category,” said Scott Tapp, 34, a senior public policy major who earned his high school equivalency degree early when he was 16 and has spent the past 18 years in the workplace. “There were more people in my age range than 18- or 19-year-olds, especially in evening classes.”
Tapp, the father of a newborn daughter, continues to work as a computer industry and financial services consultant. He is active in student government and spends 20 hours a week at his campus job in the transfer services office.
Among his peers, such campus involvement is largely the exception. The 2008 National Survey of Student Engagement, an annual Indiana University study that examines student life on campuses across the country, found that transfer students on average are less likely to interact with faculty, collaborate with classmates, participate in campus activities or seek career counseling and advice.
More than 40 percent of the students responding to the survey from 769 colleges and universities were classified as transfer students.
