UTSA works to help ease college student transfers
By Krista Torralva STAFF WRITER
Universities are doing more to help transfer students not lose credits. UTSA created a transfer calculator so counselors like Maria Ruiz can help students like Melissa Cazares plot a course.
Studies show that 43 percent of credits are lost when students transfer. Counselor Maria Ruiz can help students like Melissa Cazares to make sure they know what will and won’t transfer.
After Melissa Cazares graduated from Memorial High School on the city’s West Side, she left San Antonio to attend Texas State University. But the financial toll was hard on her father. The self-employed tile worker is the sole source of income for his family of five, she said, and he was sending her money for tuition and on-campus housing.
He wanted to sacrifice because he was proud of her, the first in their family to attend college, Cazares said, but to save money, she returned home and enrolled in Alamo Colleges to complete her basic courses, planning to transfer to the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Cazares, now 22, has been diligent about mapping out her courses, said Monica Ruiz, a senior undergraduate admissions counselor for UTSA who has an office at San Antonio College and has helped Cazares make sure all her credits transfer to the university.
More than 3,000 students will transfer to UTSA this year, among the roughly 3.7 million nationally who are expected to move from one college to another, according to estimates from The National Institute for the Study of Transfer Students.
About 40 percent of UTSA’s more than 32,000 students transferred there from elsewhere, most of them from the Alamo Colleges District, the university’s president, Taylor Eighmy, has said.
The numbers, locally and nationally, have been increasing.
Affordability is often a reason. But a 2017 U.S. Government Accountability Office report found some transfer students end up spending more in the long run because previously earned credits don’t follow them to a new school. On average, students lost 13 credit hours — a semester’s worth and about 43 percent of the credits they had accumulated, according to the report.
UTSA has long had partnerships with community colleges, especially with the Alamo Colleges, to smooth the transition and was trying to improve transfer recruitment efforts and found incoming students were looking for a way to evaluate their credits before applying, said Lisa Blazer, interim vice president for strategic enrollment.
“We weren’t really equipped to be able to handle that with our recruiters,” Blazer said.
What came from that effort was an online “transfer calculator” that was launched this spring, in time for students who may be looking to transfer to UTSA this summer or fall. It allows them to input the courses they’ve taken at their community college, or other university, to see if they would count toward the degree they wish to pursue at UTSA.
Cazares plans to pursue a bachelor’s degree in psychology with a minor in art so she can work in art therapy. She recently met with Ruiz, her admissions counselor at SAC. They plugged in the community college classes Cazares plans to take over the summer and the credits she earned from testing out of Spanish requirements.
After about 15 minutes, the results showed that Cazares will be able transfer with the maximum possible number of credits she could obtain before going to UTSA. She’ll only need to take 54 credit hours at UTSA, Ruiz said.
“Oh, wow, that’s pretty good,” Cazares said.
She’s worked at Peter Piper Pizza to help her family and pay for school, but recently left to start work as an art instructor at Palacio del Sol, a downtown apartment complex for senior citizens run by the nonprofit Mexican American Unity Council.
Like Cazares, three out of four UTSA students work while going to school, according to Eighmy’s testimony before the Texas Senate’s finance committee in February. About a quarter of UTSA students work full-time.
Though Eighmy was there to discuss higher education funding, lawmakers asked him to talk about UTSA’s efforts for transfer students.
“We’re discussing the advancement of our youngsters, first-generation, underprivileged, our veterans, to make sure when they invest money and time, that it’s not being wasted,” said Sen. Pete Flores, R-Pleasanton.
Looking to the future, Eighmy said, UTSA and the Alamo Colleges are working to establish a joint admissions program so students can be on both campuses at the same time and graduate in four years with an associate and bachelor degree. Eighmy described it as a “super version of dual enrollment.”
Increasing students’ time to graduation to four years instead of the current state average of about five or six years will also drive down student loan debt, he said, adding, “We’re going to make great progress in that regards and I want to be held accountable for that.” krista.torralva@express-news.net