What drives student success? Assessing the combined effect of transfer students and online courses

ABSTRACT

Four-year institutions of higher education in the United States are experiencing two major trends: 1. a growing number of transfer students and 2. students taking an increasing proportion of their courses online. Here, we look closely at the extent to which these two trends impact student success. Using the University of Central Florida as our case study, we examine the success of political science majors, taking into account demographics, achievement, transfer status, and the mix of course modalities students take (n = 1,173). Through descriptive statistics, regression analysis, and predicted probabilities, we demonstrate that students are less likely to be successful, as measured by fall-to-fall retention, as they take a greater proportion of their course load online. This decline is particularly dramatic for transfer students. As universities seek to address these two major trends, our data indicate that they need to be particularly sensitive to the combined effects of transfer status and online course modality.

KEYWORDS:

• Student success
• transfer
• online education
• distance education
• retention

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 This is also the case for the general student population at [university redacted], where more women than men enroll in online courses; online students are on average older than those enrolling in comparable face-to-face courses; and about half of the students in online courses work full-time. Online courses have on average ‘slightly lower success rates and higher withdrawal rates’ than face-to-face courses, while women tend to have higher success rates than men regardless of the course delivery mode (RITE 2017).

2 For studies on age and online education, see e.g., Bengiamin et al. (1998), Diaz (2002), Dutton, Dutton, and Perry (2002), van Deursen, van Dijk, and Peters (2011), Knestrick et al. (2016), Neuhauser (2002), Park and Choi (2009), Wallace and Mutooni (1997), Wojciechowski and Bierlein Palmer (2005), and Xu and Jaggars (2014).

3 For national news coverage of [university redacted]’s model and success, see for example Amrehin (2015); Anderson (2015); Holland (2016); PBS NewsHour (2015); Tugend (2018).

4 https://today.ucf.edu/center-distributed-learning-cavanagh-win-national-awards-online-programs/. Another example is Bill Gates, who lauded the university as a ‘pioneer’ and a model in its use of online education to improve higher education overall (https://today.ucf.edu/bill-gates-universities-follow-ucfs-lead-online-learning/).

5 These grade designations for ‘successful’ or ‘unsuccessful’ course completion are commonly used in higher education (see Moskal and Dziuban 2001). The authors wish to thank Carlos E. Piemonti, MBA, [university redacted’s] Institutional Knowledge Management, for providing the original dataset.

6 In analyses not presented here, these findings hold when we use the percentage of a student’s classes that were successful as the dependent variable instead of retention—transfer students and those with a higher proportion of online classes are less likely to be successful, whereas students with high GPAs are more likely to be successful.

7 We also ran additional models that included an interaction term between transfer status and GPA. The interaction terms was not significant and including it in the models did not change the direction or significance of any of the other variables.