Understanding and Supporting Your International, Transfer, and Part-Time Students

Amid intensifying policy changes and shifting student demographics, higher education institutions must reevaluate how they support three critical — and often underserved — student groups: international students, transfer students, and part-time learners. Recent federal decisions, increased scrutiny over campus environments, and emerging legal battles have exposed just how vulnerable these students can be to external forces. Institutional resilience now depends in part on adapting policies, processes, and support structures to ensure these students not only persist but thrive.

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The New Urgency: International Students Under Pressure

International students play a vital role in enriching academic environments, generating research output, and promoting cultural exchange. Yet 2025 has brought unprecedented challenges:

• Policy-Driven Disruptions: In May, a major U.S. university faced a federal revocation of its certification to enroll international students due to allegations of non-compliance with federal policies. Though a court has temporarily blocked the ruling, thousands of students remain in limbo, uncertain about their immigration status or academic futures.
  
• Broader Visa Restrictions: Ongoing visa policy changes have increased scrutiny for international students, particularly from certain countries. These changes have led to increased delays, application denials, and in extreme cases, deportation proceedings. Reports of students being detained by federal immigration authorities have further heightened fears within the international student community.
  
• Transfer Ripple Effects: As universities lose eligibility to host international students, affected learners are urgently seeking transfer options, raising the stakes for institutions to be ready with articulation agreements, visa support, and streamlined onboarding processes.
  
  

Recommendations for Institutions:

• Provide legal advising and immigration services with updated information and proactive outreach.
  
• Prepare contingency transfer pathways, ensuring students can seamlessly continue studies elsewhere if needed.
  
• Develop internal processes to support rapid evaluations and cross-departmental coordination for transitioning students.
  
  

Transfer Students: Bridging Gaps and Easing Transitions

Transfer students remain a cornerstone of enrollment strategy, especially in times of enrollment fluctuation, yet their journeys are often marked by unnecessary friction:

• Curriculum Mismatches & Credit Loss: Many students transfer without earning an associate’s degree, only to find that a portion of their credits do not apply toward their new institution’s requirements.
  
• Institutional Adjustment Challenges: Students often encounter cultural and procedural differences, from navigating class sizes and support services to accessing housing and healthcare.
  
• Inconsistent Articulation Agreements: Despite long-standing agreements, many transfers report limited awareness or inconsistent execution of these policies.
  
  

Recommendations for Institutions:

• Improve transparency through pre-transfer credit evaluations and public course equivalency databases.
  
• Establish transfer student services like orientation tracks, dedicated advisors, and peer mentorship.
  
• Foster inclusive support environments that recognize and value the experiences of transfer students.
  
  

The Overlooked Cohort: Part-Time Students

Although part-time undergraduates often receive less attention in institutional planning, they remain a critical and growing population, especially during economic downturns and amidst rising educational costs. Their needs are distinct:

• Scheduling flexibility and financial pressures often drive their enrollment decisions.
  
• Their outcomes are rarely measured by traditional success metrics, like graduation rates calculated on a six-year timeline for full-time students.
  
  

Recommendations for Institutions:

• Develop flexible course scheduling and hybrid options that accommodate working students.
  
• Use tools such as NCES College Navigator to assess your part-time population size.
  
• Monitor student success with expanded metrics, such as the RealityCheck Rate developed by the Institute for Effectiveness in Higher Education (IEHE). You can explore their recent findings in the Transfer-In Student Success analysis. For deeper insight, IEHE also published the Exceptional Overachievers Compendium, a national analysis of institutions supporting transfer students
  
  

Rethinking Metrics and Redefining Success

Standard performance indicators, especially those focused on first-time, full-time students, often exclude the students most at risk. Institutions need better tools to track how international, transfer, and part-time students are actually performing, what services they use, and where they face friction.

By shifting to data-informed, student-centric success metrics, colleges and universities can better reflect the real outcomes of their diverse student bodies.

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Moving Forward: Planning with Purpose

The volatility of recent months underscores the importance of proactive, student-centered planning. Universities that embrace agility in operations — by modernizing workflows, unifying communication channels, and increasing data transparency — will be better positioned to serve these vulnerable student populations.

Solutions like Kuali Academic Operations can quietly but powerfully support these efforts. With configurable, no-code workflows, institutions can create customized processes to manage transfer credit evaluations, onboarding, and program changes with greater speed and transparency. Kuali Academic Operations supports robust workflows that can be leveraged to improve processes for transfer students, including conditional routing, voting and approvals for credit evaluations, program modification forms that align with articulation agreements, and curriculum mapping to ensure clarity of prerequisites and degree requirements. 

Additionally, institutions can use Kuali Build to design custom onboarding workflows—for example, assigning advisors, gathering compliance documents, or launching tech access checklists—helping transfer students experience a smoother and more coordinated transition.

In times of uncertainty, commitment to student success is not just a guiding value — it’s a strategic imperative.