Exploring Faculty Perspectives on College-to-University Transfer in a Large Canadian University

Abstract

Investigations into college-to-university transfers have focused largely on the experiences of students, staff, and college faculty, while relatively little attention has been paid to the perspective of university faculty. This article first reviews the literature, which presents the views that the other stakeholders attribute to university faculty. Next, results from a survey and follow-up interviews conducted with faculty at a large Canadian university are presented. While there is some overlap between the concerns presented indirectly in the literature and the concerns expressed directly in the survey and interviews, there are also areas of divergence. The article concludes by noting that university faculty do have opinions on transfer and that their voices are worth listening to, not least because doing so will allow universities to establish how best to direct their resources to more effectively support a culture of transfer.While student transfer from college to university has been the subject of a growing volume of literature, most of this work focuses on either the policies and administrative issues involved in developing and implementing transfer partnerships between colleges and universities (e.g.

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