Transfer students face specific challenges that may impact their success in hybrid/online courses at Baruch College. In the January survey, 50% of all respondents identified themselves as a transfer student and in the May survey, 54% of respondents identified themselves as a transfer student.
In the May survey, 51% of transfer students reported that they had transferred from a community college. 84% came from another public institution, and of that number, 79% relocated to Baruch from another CUNY school. Within that population, 62% of students reported that they transferred from a CUNY community college.
Baruch College Transfer Students
Students who transfer to Baruch from the CUNY community colleges may face more academic challenges than students who begin at Baruch as freshmen. While the CUNY community colleges have open enrollment, the senior colleges are selective. However, according to information provided on the admissions page of the CUNY website, graduates of a CUNY community college with an Associates degree in Arts, Science, or Applied Science are guaranteed a placement in a CUNY senior college (although not necessarily their top choice) as long as they have a cumulative grade point average of 2.0 or better and have taken one Math and one English class in which they received a grade of C or better. In contrast, according to the Baruch College Admissions website, the average high school GPA of entering freshmen is 3.2 and the acceptance rate is only 26%. This disjuncture suggests that transfer students to Baruch from the CUNY community colleges may be less academically prepared than students entering as freshmen directly from high school.
Students from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds tend not only to have a more difficult time getting into college, they also tend to graduate at lower rates than students from more privileged backgrounds. According to the 2014 CUNY experience survey, CUNY community college students have lower household incomes and are more likely to be the first in their families to attend college than students at the senior and the comprehensive colleges.
A May 2015 report from The National Center for Education Statistics, based on data gathered from 2002-2012, affirms that “students from families with a low socioeconomic status (SES) are less likely than those from families with a higher SES to obtain higher levels of postsecondary education.” Moreover, in a 2012 paper in the journal Community Investments, Stanford University professor Sean Reardon states that “ the link between parental educational attainment and family income has grown stronger in recent decades, as the wage returns to educational attainment have increased since 1979.”
The charts below graph data from the 2014 CUNY experience survey. The data is broken up by income range, but, overall, 58% of CUNY community college students, and 47% of all CUNY students, have household incomes below $25,000 per year. The second chart graphs family educational attainment. While 22% of community college students were the first in their entire families to attend college, 49% were the first generation to attend college.
Family Income and Education
These recent findings about the exacerbation of existing achievement gaps have relevance to hybrid/online courses. In 2013, Di Xu and Shanna Smith Jaggers from the Community College Research Center at Columbia University conducted a large-scale study intended to measure differences in academic performance between face-to-face and online classes for a broad variety of students. They found that “students with stronger academic capacity tended to be less negatively affected by online courses, while students with weaker academic skills were more strongly negatively affected. The interaction also indicates that the gap in course performance between high and low-skill students tended to be stronger in online courses than in face-to-face courses.”
Socioeconomically disadvantaged students are also less likely to have access to technology off campus and may even be less technologically proficient when compared to their more privileged peers. In the article “Commuter Students Using Technology” published in Educause Review in September 2014, professors Maura Smale (New York City Tech) and Mariana Regalado (Brooklyn College) analyzed the results of their study of CUNY undergraduates and technology. They found that for many students, “economic constraints imposed real limits on their access to and use of technology off campus. Because such technologies can be leveraged for scholarly uses as well as for communication more broadly, these constraints have serious implications for students’ academic lives and beyond.” Students in lower income brackets had less access to hardware, software, and reliable data plans than their more affluent peers. Moreover, the issues went beyond access and also affected skill attainment. As Smale and Regalado point out, “mere access to technology does not tell the whole story. . . students’ experience of and preparation for using technology in their academic work was uneven — not just in their online research skills but also in their proficiency with basic productivity, word-processing, and presentation software.” College students need more than access to technology; they also require opportunities to learn competence on these technologies. Generally, competence is borne from practice, which requires steady access. Students from more well-to-do educational and family backgrounds have a marked advantage in terms of technological skill attainment over students from impoverished circumstances.
The CTL January and May surveys also revealed that transfer students may experience more disruptions in communicative technologies than other students, such as not having access to their Baruch email addresses and Blackboard sites. Transfer students to Baruch are likely not familiar with a popular platform for hybrid/online courses, Blogs@Baruch, which freshmen learn in their required Freshman Seminar course. This setback can impact adjustment to the College when students are at their most vulnerable. This is especially impactful in hybrid/online courses, where it is crucial to establish a routine and protocol in the first two weeks.
Transfer students may also not be aware of how to find and enroll in hybrid/online classes, if they are interested in doing so. Since our surveys revealed that over half of students enrolled in hybrid/online classes at Baruch this semester did not realize that they had registered for a hybrid/online class, this is an issue that the College should address as a whole.
Next section: Working Students: Preferences & Performance in Hybrid/Online Courses