Looking upstream: Identifying and describing the entry points into engineering transfer pathways

Research on transfer students identifies the specific reasons why students embark on the transfer pathway. Our study adds to this literature with its focus on understanding the broader context of transfer pathways and the relative timing of the decisions to transfer and to major in engineering. Our goal is to identify the entry points into the transfer pathways and how the decision to transfer interacts with the decision to major in engineering. We focus on student intentions and the alterations to their planned pathways. To achieve our goal we analyzed 47 in-depth interviews of traditional-age engineering transfer students from three research universities. The results reveal four distinct transfer pathways characterized by different levels of intentionality and diverse decision making sequences. The findings have important implications for broadening the transfer pathway into engineering.