Tag: Transition

  • Targeted Orientation Supports Transfer Student Transition

    Targeted Orientation Supports Transfer Student Transition

    Transfer students often face challenges integrating into their new college or university. Despite having previous experience in higher education, transfer students—particularly those from nontraditional backgrounds—can find it difficult to navigate student supports, build community and get engaged. These challenges can result in lower rates of completion among upward transfers.

    A fall 2020 survey by Inside Higher Ed and Hanover Research found that fewer than 20 percent of four-year institutions reported providing sufficient social integration services for transfer students. About half indicated they supply enough academic support to transfer students who enroll.

    Last fall, Indiana University Indianapolis launched an orientation program exclusively for incoming transfer and adult learners, designed to help familiarize them with the institution, build connections to peers and boost their confidence in attending the university.

    What’s the need: About 30 percent of undergraduates at IU Indianapolis are transfer students, said Janice Bankert-Countryman, assistant director of student services at the Center for Transfer and Adult Students. A significant number of transfers come in as juniors, having already obtained an associate degree.

    First-Year Bridge, IU Indianapolis’s orientation for new students, has historically supported all incoming students in the fall term. Staff created Bridge to Your Future: Transfer Bridge exclusively to serve the diverse needs of undergraduate transfer students, including military-affiliated students, working students and parenting students.

    “The core of Transfer Bridge is creating and maintaining relationships,” Bankert-Countryman said. “We all need relationships to survive as humans, and we certainly need relationships to thrive as students. So how do we connect students to the right people at the right time to receive the right resources that will empower them to thrive at our campuses?”

    How it works: Transfer Bridge is a coordinated effort among the Center for Transfer Students, First-Year Programs, Orientation Services, Student Transitions and Mentor Initiatives, Housing and Residence Life, and the Division of Enrollment Management.

    First-Year Bridge is required of all first-year students, but transfers can opt in to Transfer Bridge. Students learn about the opportunity through emails and meetings with their admissions counselors and academic advisers, as well as through other orientation presentations, Bankert-Countryman said.

    The pilot took place from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. over three days during orientation week—designed to accommodate the needs of working and caregiving students, Bankert-Countryman said.

    First-year orientation is a full five days, and transfer students participate in some of the larger programming, like workshops on how to join student organizations, engage in career development or understand finances. Many also join the field trip to the Indianapolis Zoo.

    In addition to receiving support from Bankert-Countryman and other staff members, transfer students engage with two peer mentors, who provide insight and advice as students navigate their transition into the university.

    Beyond orientation week, transfer students receive support through regular peer mentoring sessions, transfer student events and a Transfer Bridge fall celebration. Bankert-Countryman and the peer mentors use Canvas, email and social messaging to keep in touch with students, she said.

    The impact: Of the 25 transfer and adult students who attended the inaugural orientation, 10 were 23 years old or older, two were military-connected and 12 had transferred from the local community college, Ivy Tech.

    Sixty percent of the students who participated in Transfer Bridge have a 3.0 or higher, and many have joined student organizations or hold on-campus jobs.

    Feedback from 14 participants showed that they found the program useful as they integrated into campus, saying it helped them to feel at home.

    “This was a worth-it experience especially as someone who tends to get anxiety to new environments and overwhelmed easily,” one participant wrote in a postorientation survey. “In a nutshell, this was a good slow introduction before the first day of school.”

    What’s next: This fall, staff will scale the program to offer three sections. The university will pay for three instructors and three peer mentors to lead the additional sections.

    One section will be offered to students in the pre–Health and Life Sciences program to highlight academic planning and career development. Another section, Cyber Sandbox, will focus on tech tools on campus, introducing learners to available systems and technologies from 3-D printing to virtual reality and artificial intelligence. The third section, Connections, will center on a book, The Crossroads of Should and Must by Elle Luna, to help students connect their current learning to future goals.

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  • What a peaceful transition of power looks like

    What a peaceful transition of power looks like

    On 20 January, Donald Trump will take the office of president of the United States for the second time. It remains to be seen how this second term — interrupted by the four-year term of Joe Biden — will play itself out. 

    The first time around, President Barack Obama had left Trump a relatively stable nation and world. Trump’s term proved so disruptive, 41 of his 44 top aides, including his own vice president, refused to back him for a return to office. The next four years are likely to be a bumpy ride.

    Americans have long prided themselves on the peaceful transition of leadership.

    Traditionally, on the morning of the transfer of power, the outgoing president meets with the incoming president for coffee at the White House, they share a ride to the Capitol, trade places and say goodbye. Trump scorned that tradition by flying home to his Mar-a-Lago club in the state of Florida a few hours before the inauguration.

    Before Trump, outgoing presidents tried to ease the transition by leaving notes offering advice and best wishes to their successors in the top drawer of the desk in the Oval Office. George H.W. Bush’s note to Bill Clinton, with whom he’d waged a bare-knuckles election campaign a few months earlier, was especially gracious. 

    “I wish you well. I wish your family well. Your success now is our country’s success. I am rooting hard for you,” Bush wrote.

    Peaceful transition signals a healthy democracy.

    The tradition of a peaceful transfer of power, which dates back to George Washington, crumbled four years ago when Trump, refusing to accept the voters’ rejection of his bid for another four years of office in the 2020 U.S. election, inspired an angry mob to storm the halls of Congress. Their aim was to block certification of Joe Biden’s election to succeed Trump, something that is generally considered a formality. The would-be insurrection failed.  

    Trump is now poised to again assume the highest office in the United States. To the surprise and disappointment of nearly half the country, he narrowly prevailed over Biden’s vice president, Kamala Harris, in last November’s bitterly contested presidential race. Bowing to tradition and a sense of decency, Harris conceded the election.

    “A fundamental principle of American democracy is that when we lose an election, we accept the results,” Harris said in her concession speech. “That principle, as much as any other, distinguishes democracy from monarchy or tyranny.” 

    The current transfer of power has proceeded peacefully and the inauguration itself is expected to follow the historic norm.

    While the transfer is usually thought to include just a few procedural events and the presidential oath-taking, it consists of much more and begins almost immediately after voters cast their ballots in the fall. 

    Handing over the reins of power

    If the election winner is new to the office of president, they and their team are briefed on issues and challenges they’ll face and undergo background checks to assure their avoidance of conflicts of interest and qualification to handle sensitive information.

    Normally, the focus of a transition is on appointments to top government positions and on policy changes. 

    With the Trump transition, both have been controversial. Some of the people he’s chosen for some of the most critical jobs are far out of the U.S. political mainstream. And some of the policies he says he intends to pursue — a massive nationwide roundup and deportation of illegal immigrants, the annexation of Greenland and a takeover of the Panama Canal to mention a few — are raising alarms in the United States and abroad.

    With the recent passing of former President Jimmy Carter, I can’t help remembering a time of sharp contrast to the one we are in now. 

    The 20th of January 1981 was one of the more memorable days in U.S. history. Carter had lost his bid for reelection in large part because he had been unable to secure the release of 53 U.S. diplomats and citizens who’d been held hostage in Iran for more than a year. He’d been up until 4 a.m. that day trying to sew up a deal for their release.

    It was almost done but still incomplete as he and incoming president Ronald Reagan rode up Pennsylvania Avenue together for the inaugural ceremony in a big black armored presidential limousine known as “The Beast.”

    Front row seat to a presidential transition

    I was one of the newsmen covering Carter that day. So I got a firsthand view of how the transfer of power unfolded. When we reached the U.S. Capitol, one of the television networks aired a report that the hostages had been freed. It was premature. 

    In a final indignity to Carter, the Iranians waited until minutes after Reagan was sworn in to let an Algerian aircraft chartered to bring the hostages home take off.

    What the new president said in his inaugural speech was all but lost in the celebrations over the end of the hostage ordeal. Once the formalities were over, Carter and his entourage — his wife Rosalynn, family members, top aides and a small group of reporters — walked to a small motorcade waiting outside the Capitol building. 

    In place of “The Beast” and a long trail of support vehicles was a small sedan and several vans. We slowly made our way to Andrews Air Force Base in the Maryland suburbs of Washington D.C. where a military transport plane waited to take Carter home to Georgia. 

    Although it was the same plane he’d flown on as president, its radio call sign was no longer “Air Force One.” Now it was identified as “Special Air Mission” followed by the aircraft’s tail number, “Twenty-Seven Thousand.” Reagan was president. Carter was history.

    Before turning south, the plane flew over the White House and dipped a wing. Many aboard were in tears. But the tears turned to laughter when a young Carter aide, Philip Wise, humorously borrowed a line from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the martyred U.S. civil rights leader. “Free at last, free at last. Thank God almighty, we are free at last,” Wise shouted.

    Witnessing the most powerful office in the world change hands was like living a real-life version of the storybook “Cinderella” and seeing the coach turn into a pumpkin.

    Having witnessed so many times in so many places where a change at the top was brought about by armed conflict or a military coup, this turnover from Carter to Reagan showed the world the power of a peaceful transition.

     

    Three questions to consider:

    1. Can you think of a recent changeover from one national leader to the next that wasn’t peaceful?
    2. If a new leader is appointed by the old one without an election, would you consider that a peaceful transition of power?
    3. If you were in an important leadership position, do you think you would find it difficult to step down?

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  • Unpacking the Transition to College

    Unpacking the Transition to College

    Title: High School Benchmarks

    Source: National Student Clearinghouse Research Center

    Each year, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reports on the transition from high school to college. The latest report finds that as we move further away from the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, policy and practice are reverting to “normalcy,” though there are still lasting inequities in student outcomes.

    Throughout the report, the authors group high school graduates by several metrics to illustrate the nuances of the transition from high school to postsecondary education, using high school characteristics such as poverty level, income level, urbanicity, share of minority students, and enrollment over time, along with college characteristics and student outcomes.

    Key insights include:

    High school income classification changes during COVID-19

    In 2020, the United States Department of Agriculture allowed schools to provide student meals through the Summer Food Service Program rather than the National School Lunch Program (NSLP). The number of students who qualify for NSLP is a key poverty indicator, so this change resulted in fewer schools classified as high-poverty and low-income. When NSLP resumed normal administration in 2023, school poverty levels reverted to pre-COVID-19 distributions.

    Outcomes by high school graduating class

    Rural high schools had the largest increase in immediate enrollment following high school graduation. In 2023, 54.8 percent of graduates from rural high schools enrolled in higher education immediately, a 0.9 percentage point increase from 2022 (53.9 percent).

    Students who graduated from high-minority high schools in 2021 saw their first-to-second year persistence rates increase by 2.9 percentage points over students who graduated in 2020 (77.4 to 80.3 percent). Meanwhile, students from low-minority high schools’ first-to-second year persistence rates increased by 1.7 percentage points (85.2 to 86.9 percent).

    Six-year completion rates among high-poverty high schools rose from the class of 2016 to the class of 2017 (24.5 to 25.1 percent), and completion rates among low-poverty high schools decreased (59.9 to 59.4 percent).

    Outcomes by high school type

    Across high school characteristics, the largest disparities in enrollment, persistence, and completion rates were between high- and low-poverty high schools. High-poverty and low-income high schools had the lowest first-to-second year persistence rates (76.0 and 78.3 percent, respectively), compared with their low-poverty and high-income counterparts (90.7 and 86.7 percent, respectively).

    Disparities between high- and low-income schools widened when looking at schools with a high share of minority students. Whereas 66.5 percent of 2023 high school graduates from low-minority, high-income high schools enrolled in the first fall following graduation, only 52.1 percent of students from high-minority, low-income high schools did the same.

    For the high school class of 2017, six-year postsecondary completion rates varied considerably across high school characteristics. The share of students graduating college within six years who attended low-poverty high schools was 34.3 percentage points higher than the share of students from high-poverty high schools (59.4 compared with 25.1 percent).

    Enrollment by major

    Across several high school characteristics, students from high-poverty, low-income high schools completed degrees in STEM fields at lower rates than students from low-poverty, high-income, low-minority high schools. Whereas 22.5 percent of students from low-poverty high schools completed their STEM degree within six years, only 7.8 percent of students from high-poverty high schools did the same. Moreover, 16.9 percent of students from low-minority high schools received their STEM degree within six years, compared with 10.6 percent of students from high-minority schools.

    Among 2023 high school graduates, students from suburban high schools chose a major in business, management, marketing, and related support at a higher rate than students from rural and urban high schools (13.5 percent compared with 12.1 percent for rural and urban schools).

    To view the data, click click here..

    —Erica Swirsky

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