COVID-19 Transfer, Mobility, and Progress - First Two Years of the Pandemic Report

Oct 15, 2026

COVID-19 Transfer, Mobility, and Progress presents changes in higher-education transfer pathways over the first two years of the pandemic, focusing on enrollment shifts, transfer persistence, and how patterns diverged across time. It reports outcomes for a fixed panel covering 2021-22 (as of June 2022), using pandemic year 1 (2020-21) and year 2 (2021-22) compared to a pre-pandemic baseline (2019-20). The report highlights broad declines across all pathways, greater losses among older transfer students, and differing impacts for rural-serving institutions and minority-serving colleges.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages16

Reading Time40 min

AccessFree to download

Overview of Impacted Transfer Pathways

Section 1. Overview of Impacted Transfer Pathways

Highlights

COVID-19 TRANSFER, MOBILITY, AND PROGRESS First Two Years of the Pandemic Report COVID-19 Transfer, Mobility, and Progress First Two Years of the Pandemic Report The COVID-19 Transfer, Mobility, and Progress report series aims to identify the ways in which the pandemic is changing transfer pathways across higher education. The pandemic’s impacts on transfer enrollment shifted as the pandemic progressed, with transfer pathways and student groups showing diverging patterns over time. As the ninth issue in the series, this report summarizes notable changes in transfer enrollment and persistence post-transfer over a two-year period, with results broken out by academic year, student characteristics, and institution type and selectivity. In addition to the minority-serving institutions analyzed in previous editions, such as Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs), this report offers a new analysis of Rural-Serving Institutions (RSIs) to gain insight to how transfer pathways were impacted in rural communities over the last two years. The analysis of RSIs unpacks the broad category of four-year institutions to provide deeper understanding of the sharp decline in upward transfers and the stabilization in lateral transfers between four-year institutions—two notable trends in the second year of the pandemic. The findings in this report are based on a fixed panel of institutions representing 89.9 percent of the Clearinghouse universe of institutions, where over 13 million undergraduate students were enrolled, including 2 million transfer students, during the 2021-22 academic year as of June, 2022. Throughout the report, pandemic year 1 refers to academic year 2020-21 and pandemic year 2 refers to academic year 2021-22 whereas academic year 2019-20 is referred to as pre-pandemic year. HIGHLIGHTS ◼ Higher education experienced a total two-year loss of 296,200 transfer students, or 13.5 percent (nearly 200,000 fewer, or-9 . 1%, in year 1 and an additional-97,200, or-4 . 9%, in year 2) . All transfer pathways were impacted. Transfer pathways into two-year institutions (reverse transfer and two-year lateral transfer) experienced doubledigit rate declines (-21 .3% or-113,300 in lateral transfer; -18. 0% or-66,900 in reverse transfer) . Transfers to fouryear institutions also experienced steep declines (-9.7% or-86,000 in upward transfer; -7. 6% or-29,900 in lateral transfer) . ◼ The student persistence rate one term after transferring declined across the board and remained below pre pandemic levels. Year 2, however, showed signs of recovery among younger students (20 or younger), men, bachelor’s degree-seeking students, and at private nonprofit four-year institutions. ◼ Students over age 20 suffered steeper declines, accounting for 85 percent of the total two-year decline in transfer enrollment. These students declined at more than twice the rate of younger students (-16 . 2% vs. -7. 2% for those 20 or younger) . Younger students made up 30 percent of transfer enrollment overall. ◼ White, Black, and Native American transfer enrollments all declined precipitously over the last two years (-163,100,-16.4%; -54,800, -16.4%; -3,100, -15. 6%, respectively) . For Latinx students, lateral four-year transfers increased but upward transfers declined, and their persistence rates post-transfer declined. ◼ The pandemic had differential impacts on transfer for institutions serving specific populations of students. RuralServing Institutions (RSIs) did not fall as sharply as Non-RSIs (-51,900, -11.1% vs. -225,800, -15.4%, respectively) . HSIs suffered far steeper transfer enrollment declines than HBCUs (-102,400, -16. 9% vs. -1,000, -4. 2%, respectively) . SECTION 1. OVERVIEW OF IMPACTED TRANSFER PATHWAYS After two years of the pandemic, transfer enrollment declined 13.5 percent overall (-296,200), falling two times more steeply than non-transfer enrollment (-6.3%, -590,600).

FAQs

What major changes occurred in transfer enrollment during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic?

Transfer enrollment declined by 296,200 students (13.5%) over two years. All transfer pathways were affected and ended year 2 below pre-pandemic levels.

How did transfer pathways differ across institutions and time during the pandemic?

Pandemic year 1 drove most declines for lateral and reverse transfers, while upward transfers saw steep drops leading into year 2. Rural-serving institutions, HBCUs, and HSIs experienced different magnitudes of decline.

What did the report find about student persistence after transferring?

The student persistence rate one term after transferring declined across the board and stayed below pre-pandemic levels. Year 2 showed signs of recovery for younger students, men, bachelor’s degree-seeking students, and private nonprofit four-year institutions.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Riley West