Experiences of Community College STEM Students in Transferring and Adapting to a Four-Year Urban University

Ensuring that the bachelor's degree pathway that begins at a community college is a robust option for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) students will be key for addressing the calls to increase and diversify the future STEM workforce. Yet, students on this pathway currently face many structural barriers that can lead to attrition. In this work, we aim to understand the experiences of community college students as they transfer, adapt, and persist to graduation at an urban four-year university. First, we used the Model for Analyzing Human Adaptation to Transition to explore the experiences of community college STEM students as they transferred to an urban four-year university. Through analyzing focus groups conducted with students post-transfer, we developed the Amended Model of Adaptation to Transfer Transition (AMATT). The AMATT displays characteristics that impacted the students transition under three categories: perception of the transition, environmental characteristics, and individual characteristics. We also identified two key pathways of adaptation: surviving or thriving. Within the AMATT, we illustrate which factors contributed to each pathway of adaptation and demonstrate the relationships between the characteristics under each category. We then aimed to develop a deeper understanding of how STEM transfer students adapt to the transition to the university. Drawing from the AMATT, we chose three key factors that supported a "thrive" adaptation to investigate further: sense of belonging, social capital, and science identity. To explore how a sense of belonging may be cultivated post-transfer, we conducted interviews with a group of STEM transfer students as they neared graduation. We leveraged the Network Theory of Social Capital and Counterspaces Framework to guide our analysis and found evidence of both the elements of social capital and counterspace processes supporting the development of a sense of belonging for these transfer students. Continuing in our investigation of factors that supported a "thrive" adaptation, we again utilized the Network Theory of Social Capital to examine how a group of community college transfer students developed social support post-transfer. We conducted interviews with a second group of STEM transfer students as they neared graduation and found that social capital actions facilitated the development of relationships that provided social support post-transfer. Connections made with peers were primarily facilitated through expressive actions (i.e., emotional support), while connections made with faculty were primarily facilitated through instrumental actions (i.e., structural support). The last factor that we consider from the AMATT that supported a "thrive" adaptation is science