STATE UNIVERSITIES ARE SEEING a surge in transfer students this fall, plus their first overall enrollment boost in more than a decade, according to new estimates from higher education officials that point to persistent struggles around degree completion.
Across the state’s public higher education system, enrollment is up by 2.2 percent compared to last fall. Enrollment is up by 3.9 percent at community colleges — marking the fourth consecutive year of growth — and up by 2.2 percent at state universities, which is the first increase since 2013, according to data presented to the Board of Higher Education Tuesday. Enrollment is “level” for the University of Massachusetts system.
Department of Higher Education staff zeroed in on transfer student trends, with their enrollment increasing by 16.6 percent at state universities and by 3.8 percent at UMass.
“We are encouraged that students continue to find opportunities in Massachusetts’s public higher education system,” Interim Higher Education Commissioner José Luis Santos said in a statement. “But getting students through the door is only the beginning. The gains we see in on-time credit accumulation are promising, and we remain focused on closing equity gaps and making sure every student has the support they need to complete their degree.”
Community colleges, with their enrollment buoyed by tuition-free policies in recent years, “remain the largest source of new transfers at the state universities,” said Mario Delci, associate commissioner for research and planning.
“In our informal polling of the state university research directors, they’ve attributed these increases to more community college transfers, which is what we thought would happen,” Delci said. “They also called out students transferring from recently closed institutions, which is a really important finding on its own, in the sense that we are providing opportunities to students who have lost that opportunity through the closure of some of the independent institutions in recent years.”
Anna Maria College in Paxton shuttered at the end of the spring semester and Hampshire College plans to close after the fall semester, part of a wave of small liberal arts colleges struggling to adapt to shifting demographics and economic pressures.
Eight out of nine state universities saw “notable gains” in transfer student enrollment, Delci said. More data should be available in December to help education officials make better sense of the trend, including where exactly students are transferring from and their course enrollments, Delci said.
The latest data also underscore challenges for students to complete their degrees and equity gaps for students of color.
For the state’s public higher education system, the completion rate has “flattened out” at about 56 percent, which is below the department’s 60 percent target for 2033, said Sarah Mealey, assistant commissioner for analytics and digital services. The metric tracks the percentage of new students entering Massachusetts public institutions and successfully completing a degree or certificate anywhere in the U.S. within six years.
Francesca Purcell, a board member and senior lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, urged her colleagues and education officials to keep a “laser focus” on completion rates.
“Because at the end of the day, some college with no degree…is, sure, a little bit helpful, but really we want our students leaving our system with a credential in hand,” Purcell said.
On the community college front, Mealey pointed to “good news” for a metric that gauges the percentage of full-time students completing at least 24 credits or part-time students earning at least 12 credits in their first year. The rate was 40.3 percent for the fall 2025 cohort, an increase of about 18 percentage points compared to the fall 2012 cohort. The latest rate exceeds the department’s 2033 target of 40 percent.
There’s been “substantial improvement” for on-time credit accumulation across Black, Hispanic/Latino and white students at community colleges, Mealey said.
“Nonetheless, gaps persist,” she said. “Outcomes for white students currently meet or exceed the target across the board here, and outcomes for Black and and Hispanic students remain below the targets for the most part.”
At state universities, on-time credit accumulation climbed to 70.6 percent for the fall 2025 cohort after dropping during the COVID-19 pandemic. The state target is 80 percent target for 2033. The volume of students enrolling for a second year is also climbing after a pandemic-induced decline.
The completion rate for transfer students in 2025, measuring the percentage of individuals who graduated from a state university or UMass within four years of transferring from a community college, climbed to 64.6 percent. That’s just just below the 2033 target of 65 percent. Mealey described the trend as a “success story.”
While Gov. Maura Healey applauded the enrollment growth Tuesday and touted her administration’s investments in higher education, Delci noted the “initial boom” from free community college appears to be “moderating.” The dynamic is unfolding as Massachusetts also faces an enrollment “cliff” as the population of college-age students declines, Delci said.
“Everyone’s going to have to look together for new strategies, new ways to continue to grow enrollments at the community colleges,” he said.
