How Community College Transfer Students Negotiate Their Computing and Transfer Identities: A Mixed Methods Study

Objective: This study examined how community college transfer students in computing develop their identification with their major alongside their social identities and experiences as transfer students.

Methods: We used a sequential-exploratory mixed methods research design, leveraging existing data from community college transfer students majoring in computer science at five research-intensive universities, including interviews with 40 students and longitudinal survey data from 246 students.

Results: Qualitative findings reveal how transfer students sometimes distance themselves from their transfer status to avoid stigma, and at other times, develop an identity in computing by merging their transfer and computing selves. Key quantitative findings document variation by race/ethnicity, revealing that transfer Students of Color tend to have lower computer science (CS) identity scores when their peers are aware that they are transfer students, suggesting that transfer stigma may manifest in unique ways for Students of Color.

Conclusion: How computing transfer students identify with their discipline can intersect with how they understand themselves in relation to their transfer experience, potentially leading to identity conflicts. Fostering transfer communities within and across STEM majors may help create more transfer-receptive campuses, in which students’ transfer and computing identities are not in conflict.