Transfer students adapt to life on the Hill; college assists

Chanelle Koehn
2/17/12

Although William Jewell College has a rather small student population, students transferring into the College are not recognized immediately. But this is not just a phenomenon that occurs at William Jewell. Students in the U.S. transfer from one institution to another quite often and are perhaps lost in the shuffle. A 2011 statistic by The National Association for College Admission Counseling said that 1 in 3 students who enroll in either a two-year or four-year college will transfer at some point.
According to Kathleen Haug, assistant dean of transfer admission, it is the mission of William Jewell not only to recruit quality transfer students, but to make the transition to the College a comfortable one.
Haug has been working with Jewell transfer students since the late ’80s. She believes the College is more “transfer friendly” now than it has been in the past. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, a student transferring to William Jewell could only transfer credit from courses which were offered at the College. Students are now allowed to transfer courses that might not be offered, but could reasonably be courses available in the College’s curriculum.
Some concessions have also been made to the CTI curriculum to accommodate students in the Level II interdisciplinary courses, while still maintaining a commitment to the common core curriculum experience.
Also, because the College’s CTI program is such a small number of hours compared to general education requirements at other schools, it affords the transfer student the opportunity to complete their major often in the same time frame as a student who spends all four years at William Jewell.
According to Haug, transfer students can also receive scholarships based on the transferred credit and previous honors.
“We offer generous scholarships to students with a transfer GPA of 3.0 or higher, Phi Theta Kappa [community college honor society], talent and athletic scholarships,” Haug said.
Financial reasons are a significant issue for many transfer students. Haug said that the majority of transfer students are athletes recruited with athletic scholarships, or students who found William Jewell financially difficult to attend for a full four years.
“This is particularly the case with the strong students who receive A+ benefits,” Haug said. “We even have some students here that wanted to come to Jewell out of high school, chose a less expensive option and then realized what they were missing by not coming here was very much worth the investment.”
Regardless of what point a student transfers, there is an orientation program mandatory for transfer students. Student Affairs includes transfer students in fall orientation activities, and even has a separate mentor group led for them by a current student who was at one point a transfer to the College.
“Transfer students have different needs than those new to college and life away from home for the first time,” Haug said.  “We try to respect that while still offering them opportunities to connect with faculty, staff and students.”
Jake Sapp, sophomore, transferred to Jewell this semester from Metropolitan Community College, and went through the orientation process. Sapp said that the program was not as helpful as it could have been.
“There was a lot of information thrown at us, and we weren’t given the opportunity to really get to know the other students,” Sapp said.
Sapp was also unimpressed by the mentors in charge of the orientation program.
“It bothered me that the students they chose to mentor us kept encouraging us to be overly-involved in campus activities. I’m a commuter student, and I have a job.  I don’t have time to participate in everything,” Sapp said.
The commitment transfer students show to college is a difficult issue for national statistics to measure. According to The New York Times, a gap in federal statistics makes it incredibly difficult to compare the graduation rate between a traditional college student and a transfer student. However, William Jewell College statistics show that the graduation rate of transfer students is higher than students who enroll at William Jewell as a first-year.
“It’s not surprising to me,” said Haug. “Students who transfer must have a good academic record to be admitted and often are coming to Jewell after realizing this is the better choice for them.”
Zach Ast, first-year and recent transfer student, is one example of a student committed to his education at William Jewell.
“I finalized my always fully considered option of attending William Jewell and decided to enroll in the spring semester at the college without any single, satisfying reason or explicit mission because this university seemed to me to be one in which such a ready answer was not only not expected, but even discouraged, and where no student needed to encapsulate in a few words what their education was or where it was moving but was instead allowed to give their future the developmental time and breathing space it deserved,” Ast said.