PCC’s 2025 Transfer Report highlights a significant gap in transfer outcomes. While nearly 80% of Illinois community college students intend to transfer, only 35% actually do, and just 20% ultimately earn a bachelor’s degree. The report explores numerous barriers students face throughout the transfer process from community colleges to four-year institutions. These challenges include affordability, course credit mobility, and achieving a sense of belonging after transferring.
To supplement the report, the Mapping Transfer Pathways by Academic Major dashboard offers additional data insights. Research shows that transfers from community colleges tend to increase as institutional selectivity decreases.1 More selective institutions enroll few community college transfers, despite the fact that these students have equal or higher success rates compared to those who transferred from another four-year institution.2
In Illinois, 950 (5.8%) community college students transferred to the most- or highly-selective institutions in 2024. Among transfer students at these colleges, 36% came from community colleges, while 42% came from out-of-state institutions.
To better understand these statistics, use the Major Migrations: Program-Specific Transfer Flows dashboard to examine transfer trends not only by institutional selectivity, but also by students’ academic majors and race/ethnicity. For example, you might want to investigate how many Latinx Health majors are transferring from City Colleges of Chicago to very selective four-year universities. Similarly, the Mapping Students Transferring Out and Mapping Students Transferring In dashboards help visualize transfers across the state over time, showing where students are going and where they are coming from, broken down by institution and major.
For higher education institutions, these maps offer insights into popular transfer destinations, uncover gaps in transfer pathways within academic majors, and can help inform partnerships or articulation agreements. They also reveal whether students are staying local or moving farther away, which can influence advising strategies and support services. From a student perspective, these maps show where their peers are transferring and may help identify institutions that align with their intended major and academic goals.
Acknowledgements
The Partnership for College Completion expresses its sincere appreciation to Wintrust Bank and Wintrust Financial Corporation for supporting the completion of the data dashboards. The views expressed within the resource content do not necessarily reflect those of the funder.
Thank you to PCC Research and Data Associate, Giselle Palacios, for her research, development, and design efforts in the data collection and visualization of the dashboards.
End Notes
1Xueli Wang, “A Multilevel Analysis of Community College Students’ Transfer to Four-Year Institutions of Varying Selectivity,” Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education, 118(12), (2016): 1-44. https://doi.org/10.1177/016146811611801202; Jennifer Glynn, Persistence: The Success of Students Who Transfer from Community Colleges to Selective Four-Year Institutions, Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, (2019), https://www.jkcf.org/research/persistence/.
2Ibid.