May 2026
Successful transfer to a four-year college remains one of the most important pathways to economic mobility for California community college students. In order for students to become transfer ready, they first need to pass transfer-level math and English, accumulate transferrable units, and persist from one term to the next.
These early milestones, or transfer momentum points, can predict whether students ultimately reach their transfer goals. Yet colleges continue to ask an important question: What institutional services help students equitably reach these key momentum points?
At EdInsights, our research team partnered with Sacramento City College to explore this question through a collaborative research partnership focused on understanding and supporting disproportionately impacted students’ momentum toward transfer.
Building a Collaborative Research Partnership
EdInsights collaborated with Sacramento City College to design and conduct a study following the academic journeys of over 10,000 first-time students. Sacramento City College, a designated Hispanic-Serving Institution, serves over 21,000 students, with nearly 30 percent being first-generation college students. The composition of Sacramento City College’s student body underpins the importance of understanding the experiences of students from various disproportionately impacted groups.
College and district leaders and EdInsights researchers worked together to identify research questions and connect the analysis to ongoing institutional priorities and strategic planning related to transfer and equitable student success. Together, we identified factors that we suspected could be linked to transfer momentum attainment, including demographic and educational characteristics.
Practitioners understand students’ experiences and institutional realities, so we worked to ensure our study design would generate actionable data that could inform their practice and decision making. Our approach was intended to help practitioners make sense of patterns in student outcomes and inform conversations about how institutions can better support students.
Why Focus on Early Transfer Momentum?
Transfer momentum points are valuable because they occur early enough in a students’ journey where staff can intervene and provide additional support.
Research has consistently shown that students who complete transfer level math and English, accumulate transferrable units, and persist between terms are more likely to become transfer ready. Our work builds on the RP Group’s African American Transfer Tipping Point Study, which highlighted the importance of early academic momentum for Black/African American students in California Community Colleges. Building on the Tipping Point study, our partners at Sacramento City College wanted to understand how momentum point attainment operates for students from other disproportionately impacted groups.
Connecting Student Services to Transfer Momentum
While previous research has established that early momentum points are strongly connected to transfer outcomes, less attention has been paid to how institutional practices help students reach those milestones in the first place. While many prior studies focus on how outcomes are patterned by demographic characteristics, we wanted to understand whether use of student supports is predictive of whether students meet early transfer momentum points.
Understanding the association between students’ use of supports and meeting early transfer momentum became a central focus of our partnership with Sacramento City College’s Enrollment and Student Services team. Importantly, this approach also reframed conversations away from student deficits and towards institutional conditions, a central focus of Edinsights’ and Sacramento City College’s commitment to equity-centered practices. This shifted the conversation from “Which students achieve momentum?” to “Which institutional practices help students build momentum toward transfer?”
To explore this question, we examined supports and experiences such as:
- Receiving counseling
- Completing an education plan
- Participating in equity intervention programs (including EOPS, Puente, and Umoja)
- Maintaining good academic standing
By focusing on student support practices, the study created opportunities to examine how institutions can strengthen systems and supports. We know student services professionals experience significant challenges due to insufficient resources and overseeing large workloads. The data provided an opportunity for the college to assess whether student services interventions were working as intended and whether they were operating equally for students across disproportionately impacted groups.
EdInsights engaged college personnel from across the institution to discuss the research findings and explore opportunities and strategies for furthering student support from their role. Moreover, the cross-college discussions about these data provided Sacramento City College leadership with opportunities to consider innovative solutions for not only furthering student support practices, but by innovating around how these services are carried out and by whom.
Why This Work Matters
Improving transfer outcomes requires more than helping students apply to transfer. It requires supporting students from the beginning of their college journeys and ensuring they can successfully navigate the academic milestones that make transfer possible.
EdInsights’ partnership with Sacramento City College created space for researchers, student services professionals, and college leadership to work together to understand patterns, connect data to practice, and identify opportunities for continuous improvement in both practice and institutional structure.
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