• About BCCAT: Fulfilling Our Mandate
• Collaborating with BC Post-Secondary Partners
• Understanding Student Mobility
  • Traditional Transfer Students
  • Following a Cohort of Eligible Transfer Students
  • Movement of Students from Research-Intensive Universities to Other Institutions
  • Why Do We Want to Know More About All Movers? How Can We Do This?
  • Is the Transfer Route as Efficient as the High School Entry Route to Degree Completion at a BC Research University?
• Facilitating Admissions, Transfer, and Articulation
• Supporting Students' Education Planning
• Advancing Inter-Provincial Mobility
• Appendices

• Annual Review 2010-11 PDF

Annual Review Home

 

Understanding Student Mobility

The BC Transfer System, which had its inception in the late 1960s, was built on the traditional sending and receiving dichotomy in which students took all or part of their first two years of study at a college (sending institution) and then moved to a research university (receiving institution) to complete their degrees. Because of this dichotomous model, BCCAT's research agenda over the years has focused almost exclusively on the movement and success of this body of "traditional" transfer students. Indeed, there are still close to 5,000 students each year that take this transfer route, and BCCAT and post-secondary institutions is still very interested in the long-term trends pertaining to these students.

However, the BC post-secondary system has changed dramatically in the last two decades, and it is incumbent upon our transfer system to change accordingly and move away from a purely sending and receiving model. Students now have many more options for degree completion with the creation of "teaching-intensive" universities and expansion of degree-granting authority to colleges and private institutions. Students can either stay at the institution that they first enrol in and complete a credential or move to any number of other post-secondary institutions for credential completion.

The BC post-secondary system has changed dramatically in the last two decades, and it is incumbent upon our transfer system to change accordingly and move away from a purely sending and receiving model.

Figure 1: 22,500 active credit course registrants moved between BC public post-secondary institutions from 2007/08 to 2008/09.

Source: Student Transitions Project.

In 2010-11, the Student Transitions Project's (STP's) Post-Secondary Student Mobility Sub-Committee developed a new model for identifying students enrolled in credit courses who move from one public post-secondary institution to another from one academic year to the next. The same model was used to track traditional student movement from colleges, teaching-intensive universities (TIU's), and institutes to research-intensive universities (RIU's).

Figure 1, which is a result of STP's new model, shows clearly that students are moving in large numbers and in all directions with 22,500 switching institutions between 2007-08 and 2008-09. While large numbers of students continued to move to RIU's, students also moved from RIU's to other institutions and from colleges and institutes to TIU's and vice versa. Furthermore, many students that stayed in the same post-secondary sector also switched institutions. The movement in multiple directions is evidence of the impact of the many changes in institutional mandate that have been made in BC in recent years.