Expanding Change Teams Without Losing Momentum: Lessons from the STEM Transfer Partnership

Scaling organizational change in higher education is hard. Scaling it across institutions while staying focused on equity, student outcomes, and shared purpose is even harder.

That challenge sits at the heart of the STEM Transfer Partnership (STP), a multi-year, research-informed initiative led by Community College Research Initiatives (CCRI) at the University of Washington. STP brings together faculty, staff, administrators, and undergraduate transfer students from community colleges and universities across Washington State to improve STEM transfer and degree completion for students from low-income backgrounds.

As STP entered a new phase known as STP 2.0, teams were asked to do something ambitious: expand. Institutions added new partners, disciplines, departments, and, critically, undergraduate transfer students as full team members. With growth came opportunity, but also real questions:

How do teams expand without losing clarity or momentum?
What structures and practices help new members engage meaningfully?
How can student voices be centered in this process?
And what does it take to sustain collaboration as complexity increases?

Our newest data note, Expanding Organizational Change Teams: Insights from the STEM Transfer Partnership, explores these questions using survey data collected from STP community of practice members during the early stages of STP 2.0.

Why this data note matters

Research on organizational change often emphasizes the difficulty of moving beyond small pilot teams. Yet many initiatives stall not because the ideas are flawed, but because growth isn’t intentionally designed. This data note offers practice-grounded insight into what team expansion actually feels like from the inside across 19 institutions and an approximately 160-member community of practice.

Rather than focusing on outcomes alone, the data note examines the conditions that support (or complicate) expansion, surfacing lessons that are relevant well beyond STP for anyone engaged in cross-institutional partnerships, transfer reform, or equity-centered change work.

Key insights from STP 2.0

Across four surveys administered in 2025, several consistent themes emerged:

Start with relationships. Expansion was smoothest when teams built on existing professional relationships. New partnerships were possible, but required more intentional structure and relationship-building.
Use data to anchor shared purpose. Shared data helped teams align priorities, move beyond anecdote, and focus conversations, especially as new institutions and disciplines joined the work.
Document direction through action planning. Clear, written action plans were essential for helping new members understand goals, roles, and how their contributions fit into the larger effort.
Collaborative culture matters as much as tools. Trust, mutual respect, and inclusive decision-making allowed teams to use data and planning tools productively, even as teams grew.
Communication infrastructure is not optional. Shared documents, centralized repositories, and tools like AI-supported meeting notes helped teams stay connected across schedules and institutions.
Onboarding is essential infrastructure. Informal onboarding quickly breaks down at scale. Teams benefited from written materials, timelines, and documented decisions to reduce confusion and reliance on institutional memory.
Smaller subgroups support engagement and sustainability. Creating working groups with clear leads and co-leads helped distribute leadership and prevent burnout.
Student voice requires intentional role design. Undergraduate transfer students were widely viewed as a strength of STP 2.0, but teams needed clearer structures to support meaningful participation.
Flexibility supports equity. Offering multiple ways to participate—synchronous, asynchronous, large-group, and task-based—made engagement more feasible amid heavy workloads and with existing incentive systems.

Together, these findings reinforce a core takeaway: expanding change teams isn’t just about adding people. It’s about designing the conditions that allow growth to strengthen collective capacity for change.

Join the conversation

The full data note goes deeper into each of these insights, drawing directly from participant voices and connecting them to broader research on organizational change.

If you’re working to expand a cross-institutional partnership, integrate student voices, or sustain momentum in complex change efforts, we invite you to read the full data note and reflect on how these lessons resonate with your own context.

👉 Read the full data note: Expanding Organizational Change Teams: Insights from the STEM Transfer Partnership

We also invite you to continue the conversation:

Which of these lessons feels most relevant to your work right now?
Where has expansion strengthened your efforts, and where has it created new challenges?

Change at scale is a design challenge. We hope these insights help inform how you design for growth, collaboration, and equity in your own initiatives.

Unlocking STEM Potential: How Partnerships are Bridging the Transfer Gap

Imagine a future where talented science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) students from low-income backgrounds have a clear and supported pathway from their community college to a 4-year university to complete their bachelor’s degree in their chosen major. This vision is becoming a reality thanks to innovative partnerships between 2-year and 4-year institutions.

The STEM Transfer Partnership began with nine teams composed of 2-year and 4-year institutional partners. These teams have been working collaboratively to increase access to and bachelor’s degree completion for STEM transfer students from low-income backgrounds. These partnerships were formed towards the end of the COVID pandemic, as institutions were readjusting to a new normal and returning to campus with fewer students and, thus, fewer resources. During this challenging time, faculty, staff and administrators faced many demands on their time and attention. We are grateful these teams chose to focus on improving their transfer students’ experiences by growing their partnerships, building relationships, and creating solutions.

Data Note 5 from the STEM Transfer Partnerships (STP) initiative unveils the power of collaboration by sharing case studies of nine dedicated teams. The teams who collectively comprise the STP community of practice are composed of faculty, staff, and administrators working together to break down the barriers that often hinder the transfer and completion rates of STEM students from low-income backgrounds.

Discover how these partnerships are:

Improving advising: Streamlining guidance, fostering personalized support, and creating clear pathways to success.
Enhancing recruitment and enrollment: Inspiring student interest, increasing access to opportunities, and simplifying the transfer process.
Strengthening faculty and curriculum: Improving gateway course outcomes, promoting research experiences, and providing courses to be major ready to transfer.

This Data Note showcases examples from this community of practice’s partnerships. Some of the exciting things you will see in these case studies are the myriad ways teams changed practices and processes to improve transfer student experiences. All teams utilized student input in their change process.

Key takeaways from across these case studies highlight the importance to:

- Build relationships
- Center transfer student input in the process
- Use data to monitor and improve outcomes
- Tie efforts to other institutional resources with similar goals
- Get leadership involved

This publication, co-created with our team leads, provides valuable insights for educators, administrators, and policymakers seeking to improve STEM transfer rates and empower the next generation of scientists and innovators.

Read the full brief to learn more about the strategies and successes of these impactful partnerships.

UW Community College Research Initiatives awarded $1.7 million grant from Ascendium Education Group to continue STEM Transfer Partnerships program

The University of Washington’s Community College Research Initiatives (CCRI) has been awarded a $1.7 million grant from Ascendium Education Group to continue its STEM Transfer Partnerships (STP) program, which aims to increase equity in STEM education for low-income learners across Washington state. This funding extension builds on an earlier $1.17 million grant, continuing the work to improve outcomes for underserved students in STEM fields.

CCRI conducts research to promote equity in higher education, with a focus on the experiences of underserved student populations. Ascendium supports initiatives aimed at helping students from low-income backgrounds achieve postsecondary degree completion. With aligned goals of enhancing access and success for low-income learners, Ascendium is a natural and valuable partner in advancing CCRI’s efforts.

Building on success and expanding opportunities

CCRI will build on the successes of the original initiative, adding key enhancements to further support low-income STEM transfer students in Washington state.

“We are deeply grateful to Ascendium Education Group for continuing to support the STEM Transfer Partnership project. This second grant provides an incredible opportunity to build on our successes and deepen our impact,” says Lia Wetzstein, director of CCRI and principal investigator on the grant.

“Thanks to our teams advancing their work to lower barriers to STEM transfer, together we are creating pathways for more low-income students to achieve living-wage careers and thrive in a rapidly changing economy. With this support, we will further cultivate a community of practice that strengthens transfer partnerships, drives innovation and creates equitable opportunities across institutions.”

The new grant will enable the STEM Transfer Partnerships (STP) project to build on the successes of the original initiative while introducing key enhancements to further support low-income STEM transfer students in Washington state. In the first phase, the project focused on establishing partnerships between 2-year and 4-year institutions, providing $25,000 to each institutional partner. STP 2.0 will continue this funding model, offering $25,000 to each partner, while formalizing critical drivers of success. The new phase will emphasize a more inclusive, student-centered approach, incorporating paid student team members and expanding teams to include additional STEM disciplines. Faculty and staff are also being leveraged as mentors for returning team members. Other key enhancements include the introduction of standardized data reporting to track student-level outcomes and a focus on ensuring leadership buy-in at participating institutions.

Like in the STP 1.0, a critical component of STP 2.0 is the provision of financial and human resources to ensure the sustainability of partnerships. By continuing to address systemic barriers and strengthen transfer pathways, STP 2.0 will expand opportunities for low-income STEM students to achieve their academic and career goals while fostering innovations to improve transfer success and equity for all students across the state.

“CCRI’s impact on the transfer experience begins with deep research and continues with implementation and dissemination of best practices. This latest investment will allow partner institutions to extend and deepen their student success work. At the same time, CCRI and their partners will continue to tackle system barriers, making the transfer pathway smoother for many more students, particularly those who have been historically underserved in higher education,” says Michaelann Jundt, senior associate dean of Undergraduate Academic Affairs and the UW’s representative to the state’s Joint Transfer Council.

“We are excited to continue leading this work, which holds immense potential to benefit students, institutions, and our state by fostering a culture of collaboration around transfer to elevate transfer student success—starting with STEM and expanding to all programs, “ says Wetzstein. “This work can also serve to empower students, staff and faculty to work together to lead transformative change across institutions while advancing our understanding of partnership strategies that drive measurable improvements in student outcomes.”

About the University of Washington’s Community College Research Initiatives

The University of Washington’s CCRI conducts research to generate actionable knowledge aimed at advancing equity in higher education. A program of Undergraduate Academic Affairs, CCRI focuses on studying the experiences of underserved student groups who enter higher education through community colleges and the role institutions play in supporting equitable educational and employment outcomes. By leveraging research findings, CCRI drives meaningful change in postsecondary education. To learn more, visit the CCRI website.

About Ascendium Education Group

Ascendium Education Group is a nonprofit organization committed to helping individuals achieve their education and career goals. Ascendium focuses on increasing the number of students from low-income backgrounds who complete postsecondary degrees, certificates, and workforce training programs. With a focus on first-generation students, incarcerated adults, rural community members, students of color, and veterans, Ascendium works to identify and scale best practices that drive large-scale change in education systems and promote opportunity for all. For more information, visit the Ascendium website.

For more information or to get involved, contact Lia Wetzstein at ccri@uw.edu.

Examining Gaps in Supporting Underserved Community College Students

Within CCRI’s research, we recognize the unique challenges faced by students from marginalized backgrounds, particularly those belonging to communities of color, who form a significant portion of our community college demographic. Our exploration of data and historical trends reveals that due to a persistent lack of clarity in transfer pathways in STEM majors, these students may not be prepared to apply for their preferred university or major.

Given the ever-expanding nature of STEM disciplines and the increasing competitiveness among students, it is imperative that we develop a strategic plan of action. Our focus is on establishing and enhancing partnerships specifically tailored to address the needs of disproportionately marginalized students. Throughout our research, we emphasize resource equity and access to fortify our support framework for these students. As we diversify the conversations of how to approach providing these resources and support systems, we encourage you to read our findings which may be accessed here.

STEM Transfer Partnership’s Convening 4

We are excited to share the great work being accomplished with this community of practice which is dedicated to improving transfer for STEM students from low-income backgrounds. The STEM Transfer Partnerships program convened for the 4th time last week and we experienced new connections being made for STEM pathways among 2- and 4-year institutions in WA state, sharing ideas on ways to continue growing and sustaining these partnerships, and new team members! We’ll be writing about what we’ve learned from this convening and look forward to sharing it with you. We invite you to read our previous 3 data notes on structuring STEM transfer partnerships, complex networks of community and learning from students.

NTSW: Overcoming the Turbulent Period of COVID-19 Through CCRI Student Support

MoveInDay_2020 072.jpg

With Transfer being one of the most understudied yet most frequently occuring phenomena in higher education, it is important to recognize the functions at play involving societal inequities that continually contribute to adversities transfer students face. Considering transfer students already deal with intense adjustments depending on the institutions they come from (i.e. new requirements, new social communities, and completely readjusting their own approach to participation in contrasting cultural even linguistic circumstances), providing students with adequate connections, staffing support, and guidance becomes a much-needed tool in their tool kit for success.

Attending to student needs, overall, has taken a massive shift since the pandemic. Being a transfer student during this time poses a unique challenge of navigating two big transitions as they adapt to a new institution. One is the online learning environment and adjusting to regulations and rules that continue to change, and one is related to returning to the “normal” standards of the school (something students are unaccustomed to because of the pandemic’s influence).

The CCRI team sought to raise awareness on transfer student needs during this time. Our researchers, Debra Bragg, Lia Wetzstein, Elizabeth Apple Meza, & Theresa (Ling) Yeh analyzed different methodologies to support students and bolster their success during this unstable period. Read more about this in Data Note 11 of the Transfer Partnership Series.

NTSW: STEM Transfer Partnership Engineering Pathway Access Increase

ChemE Capstone project

Team members Matthew Ford, Aleya Dhanji, Kira Glynn King, Jie Sheng, Skyler Roth, and Emese Hadnagy have been looking into increasing and consistently expanding outreach to minority serving 2-year and 4-year institutions to promote engineering pathways for increasing students’ upward mobility. Through countless trials and tribulations, this incredible group of individuals focused on identifying shared data needs around student success barriers, established inter-institutional data sharing protocols, and developed a framework to significantly increase, diversify, and enhanced existing outreach, recruitment and academic advising practices in support of these students.

Such work is extensively crucial in promoting equity-based educational protocols for transfer students moving through STEM pathways. Many of these students face disproportionate experiences of adversity and barriers to their success as minority students, let alone being transfer students. As such, the team’s development and utilization of a new, holistic data model for transfer pathways has been extensively successful in expanding Moser’s Transfer Student Capital model, leading to potential expansive increases in student accessibility of support during their transfer STEM experiences and prospective, successful outcomes. Such work lends a promising outlook for the future of transfer partnerships along the road, hosting great impact for student support and STEM engagement.

You can find the full journal article HERE

Talking about Transforming Transfer with the Chronicle of Higher Education

In August, Dr. Lia Wetzstein, the director of CCRI, participated in a panel discussion hosted by the Chronicle of Higher Education. The focus of discussion was the need to improve the transfer process to achieve more equitable outcomes in higher education. Lia had the opportunity to highlight CCRI’s STEM Transfer Partnerships, composed of nine teams from two-year and four-year institutions in Washington. These teams have been actively engaging with their students to gather valuable input. This feedback has influenced their initiatives, leading to innovative approaches to enhance the transfer student experience, particularly those from low-income backgrounds.

You can read more about the panel discussion here.

Transformative partnership praxis for equitable STEM transfer

As the STEM Transfer Partnership (STP) program approaches the one-year mark, we are able to reflect on the strategies for success that our two-year and four-year institutional partners have developed in their work to advance their partnerships and increase STEM transfer success for low income students. In our second data note on the STP program, we describe the ways STP partnership teams are dismantling barriers through networks of transformative partnership praxis, building multi-layered and flexibly structured communities.

Over the course of 12 months, CCRI has supported the progress of STP teams and their plans of action aimed at improving STEM transfer for students at their institutions. Teams have engaged in two full-community gatherings as well as monthly coaching sessions. Throughout, CCRI has collected data on their experiences through participant observation, survey, and document analysis. Examining this data, we find that teams often experience similar barriers in their efforts to implement systemic change in STEM transfer processes, most notably low-income student recruitment and long term program sustainability. In our recent data note, we look at how partnering institutions respond to these challenges. We find that taking steps toward institutional transformation requires participants to build flexible and multi-layered communities, networks that draw upon resources and expertise from beyond the team membership.

At this intermediate stage of the program, many STP teams are working on the big problems that make the work of expanding STEM access and supporting transfer students so challenging. One central challenge is the question of how to recruit students from low-income backgrounds to STEM fields and how best to support them through transfer and degree completion. What are the best ways to reach out to these students in the early years of their college education? How can support programs engage these students as they juggle the competing priorities of school, family, and work schedules? In tackling these questions, teams are often prompted to expand the boundaries of their networks of praxis, connecting with programs such as TRIO and MESA that have a well-established set of strategies for engaging and supporting low-income students. Rather than trying to ‘reinvent the wheel’ as several participants phrased it, teams are joining forces with partners across their institutions in collaborations that benefit low-income students in many ways. Teams are also extending their networks to engage institutional leaders, finding ways to engage college and university administrators in ways that broaden the impact of their work.

STP teams are not limiting their outreach to their respective institutions but, rather, reaching beyond the college and university of their partnership to include not only other institutions but also policymakers, students and families, and professional networks. The STP program is designed to embed the work of partnerships within a community of practice, invested professionals committed to interventions to improve STEM transfer. The purpose of the biannual convenings is to foster cross-community collaboration and learning. The most recent data note describes how these kinds of connections are helping teams identify resources and solve complex problems. As they look to the future to map out a plan for long term sustainability, they draw upon ideas from other teams, using those ideas to connect with policymakers, industry partners, and others in ways that support programs and interventions that will continue to improve STEM transfer success beyond the life of the STP grant.

Each reconfiguration and expansion of community creates new opportunities for equitable STEM access. While the data reported here demonstrate how networks of praxis support problem solving for STP teams, the impact of expanding the community goes beyond finding solutions to specific problems. Teams are learning new skills, developing new partnerships, and incorporating new resources into their work in ways that create benefits for the college and university beyond STEM programs.

STEM Transfer Partnership: Advancing our Community

As we embark on the second year of the STEM Transfer Partnership (STP) initiative, we finally got our first chance to come together in person at our October convening in Ellensburg, Washington. Because our first convening had to be held remotely due to continuing pandemic precautions, we were thrilled to be able to finally meet everyone in person and make our community stronger through the informal exchanges that are difficult to facilitate in virtual settings.

The October event built upon all the previous work of the STP teams. It included celebrating progress since the April convening and moving forward within each partnership to advance interventions to engage and support low-income students and create innovative, durable transfer pathways. The teams presented a variety of different interventions they were working on. Many institutional pairs discussed new curricular structures while others described the steps they had taken in establishing undergraduate research experiences, creating transfer maps, mentorship networks, and inter-institutional student engagement programs.

Highlights of the day included roundtable discussions across topics such as curriculum, data sharing, low-income student support, and gathering student input. We also learned about STEM communities of transformation from our guest speaker, Dr. Sean Gehrke, Director of the Office of Educational Assessment at the University of Washington. Working in their teams, partnerships had opportunities to identify and dissect current barriers to their work and develop strategies to garner external support for their programs. Each team produced a poster that summarized and motivated their partnership initiatives, articulating an “elevator pitch” designed to engage stakeholders outside their partnership. We concluded the day with a lively ‘gallery walk,’ where teams shared their posters and their elevator pitch among all the convening participants.

One of the key goals of this convening was to foster a cross-partnership exchange of ideas and community building. To that end, the convening agenda balanced sessions dedicated to work within teams and in ones that involved interaction with other teams. Teams had opportunities to brainstorm creative solutions with other teams and learn about the many different strategies for low-income student support and enhanced transfer processes. For many participants, this dynamic was the key benefit of the convening. One post-event survey respondent commented, “It was really nice just to meet people who are interested in similar things across the state and feel like we have allies.” Another respondent identified their key benefit from the convening, “Having a community to consult with and bounce ideas off of – we are able to streamline a bit more, not everyone re-inventing the wheel. Having engaging discussions about why this is important and creating that community culture.” We were excited to see and later hear about these productive exchanges and will continue to strengthen and expand our community of practice.

We are so gratified to be a part of this process, working with dedicated professionals who took time out of their overcrowded schedules to come together in community with us. Together we are advancing equity by expanding STEM education opportunities for low-income students across the state.