The Need for Equitable Scholarship Criteria for Part-Time Students

Current policies and interventions to enhance student success and retention are often tied to full-time enrollment, which are substantiated by studies associating part-time enrollment with lower retention and poorer academic outcomes. However, these findings are limited to studies of first-time college students and do not represent today’s nontraditional undergraduate who may be transfer, online, and working adult students. To enhance retention of on-campus and hybrid online 2 + 2 transfer students in a STEM undergraduate program, need-based scholarships are awarded to students enrolled full-time as stipulated by the federal granting agency. Although the scholarship has helped >80 students to date, over 40% of eligible transfer students are excluded only because they are enrolled part-time, disproportionately affecting students in the hybrid online track who are more likely to be women and underrepresented minorities. Using quantitative and qualitative methods, this study explores enrollment behavior of transfer students (online and on-campus), its relationship with student characteristics and academic outcomes, and implications for scholarship eligibility. Full-time enrollment is a significant challenge for transfer students. While scholarship requirements are a key factor influencing full-time enrollment, online transfer students additionally cite work and family obligations as drivers of enrollment behavior. Thus, online 2 + 2 transfer students face different challenges than on-campus peers and are more likely to enroll part-time out of necessity, yet still have comparable GPA and graduation rates. These findings support a growing awareness of barriers nontraditional students face questioning the relevance of policies driven by “traditional” student outcomes, which perpetuate inequity in higher education.