Experiences of Computer Science Transfer Students

About half of recent computer and information science graduates attended community college at some point. Prior work on transfer students in general suggests that the transfer process can engage people from underrepresented communities, but can also be academically and socially “shocking”. However, we know little about the experiences of transfer students in computer science in particular. We used the Laanan-Transfer Student Questionnaire (L-TSQ) to survey 25 transfer students and 135 native (non-transfer) students and conducted follow-up interviews with 8 transfer students attending a large public 4-year university in a city with significant technology industry presence. We found that while transfer students were more diverse demographically, the support of the university for transfer student orientation tended to mitigate social shocks of transferring. This did not, however, eliminate gaps in academic performance. These findings suggest that there are other non-social factors that influence academic performance that CS programs must support to equitably engage students who transfer.