PACIFIC NORTHWEST TRANSFER LANDSCAPE: A COMPLEX AND DECENTRALIZED BARRIER FOR GEOSCIENCE

The undergraduate geoscience transfer landscape in the Pacific Northwest is complex and decentralized. On the positive side, this gives students many choices and presumably serves each university’s student population. However, this variety results in significant barriers to students wanting to transfer from the more than 50 community colleges in Washington and Oregon and impedes effective advising of these students. Recognizing this complexity, the Washington Earth Sciences Summit on Undergraduate Transfer brought together educators to document and clarify the range of programs available to students.

There are ten geoscience bachelor's programs in Washington and four in Oregon. Besides the variability in geoscience courses, the bachelor’s programs have variable requirements in mathematics, physics, chemistry, and other associated courses that students generally take before transfer. For instance, some programs do not require any calculus, while others require a full year of calculus, including multivariate. Some programs require only one algebra-based physics course, while others require three quarters of calculus-based physics. The result of this variability is that the program of study for community college students needs to be tailored to their transfer destination or students will take unneeded classes at the community college and be missing critical classes at transfer, resulting in delays in completion and unused credits. This higher credit load is strongly correlated with higher student debt and lower completion rates. To assist advisors and students, we have created a transfer document that lays out these differences of course requirements in a simplified diagram. This diagram is also available for bachelor's programs to examine their degree requirements when considering curricular revisions.

While 70-80% of all community college students aspire to transfer to a four-year institution, only about 20% achieve this goal (Wang, 2020). In the geosciences, approximately one in five geoscience graduates reported taking a course at a community college (Keane et al., 2022). The barriers to successful transfer continue to push a more diverse population out of the geosciences pathway. Creating greater transparency to the transfer process can help to alleviate an impediment to student success.