Studying Far from Home, Xueli Wang Discovers Kinship with Two-Year College Students

November 11, 2014

Xueli Wang

Xueli Wang

In 2004, Xueli Wang moved from China to attend graduate school at The Ohio State University. The transition was far from easy. Despite a good command of academic English, informal conversation challenged her. She had trouble ordering in restaurants and navigating public transportation. She remembers frequently feeling isolated and overwhelmed.

It was perhaps those experiences that changed the course of her life and studies. While working a student job at Ohio State, Wang was assigned to a project analyzing the experiences of students who transferred from community colleges to a four-year degree program at the university.

“I felt an immediate sense of connection with (these) transfer students,” Wang said. “There were so many similarities between their struggles and my own, like having to navigate an entirely new educational setting, and being stereotypically perceived as having issues in our academic studies.”

Wang was encouraged by her observation that these students quickly bounced back from their initial “transfer shock.”

“I had heard so much about what disadvantages these students faced, but despite all the challenges and stigma they encountered, they were a very motivated and resilient group of people,” Wang said. “That definitely helped me get over my own culture shock.”

Newly motivated, Wang made the study of transfer students the focus of her graduate studies. In 2008, she wrote her doctoral dissertation on the factors predicting educational outcomes for community college students who aspire to transfer to four-year college programs.

Wang is now an assistant professor at UW-Madison in the School of Education’s Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis, and a principal investigator with the Wisconsin Center for Education Research. She has performed groundbreaking research on the experiences and success of community college students who transfer to four-year institutions.

“That exposure to community college students completely changed my life. My fascination with their pathway has substantively defined who I am as a researcher,” Wang said. “Their stories became what I’m passionate about.”

For instance, she recalls providing a new transfer student with directions by walking with her. “I was trying to provide all kinds of help, knowing that she was new and I’d been on campus for two years. I realized my own researcher tendencies of over-helping when, graciously and in a very friendly way, she began teaching me a lot of things I didn't know about Ohio State.

“Often, we put traditionally underrepresented students, including transfers, into boxes and think about them using a deficit model, but in fact there is a lot to learn and acknowledge about these individuals.”

With more than eight million students enrolled at community colleges nationwide, including 43 percent of all undergraduates and a disproportionately large number of minority students, Wang sees enormous potential for her research to improve the education and lives of a large percentage of young Americans fighting to make it into the middle class.

Last year, she was awarded a grant from the Association for Institutional Research and the National Science Foundation to study course-taking patterns among community college students planning to transfer into baccalaureate STEM programs. Earlier this year, she won another NSF grant, worth $1.4 million, to study students at Wisconsin’s two-year colleges who aspire to transfer into science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) majors at four-year institutions. The new grant will allow Wang to follow a cohort of 3,000 students in Wisconsin.

The Wisconsin Idea inspires Wang and she emphasizes this will be her first study focusing exclusively on transfer students in Wisconsin, her adopted home. She hopes to illuminate students’ motivational factors and learning experiences, and identify the practices and policies that facilitate their transition into STEM fields at flagship state campuses like UW–Madison.

“I love the state, and it means a lot to me to have the opportunity to study both what has made the university system in Wisconsin so strong and to discover ways to make it even stronger,” Wang said.

First-generation, low-income and underrepresented minority students are those who will benefit the most from improving the transfer processes between two-and four-year colleges. Wang hopes her research eventually will result in larger numbers of these STEM-aspiring students choosing and graduating with STEM majors, which will open up new and rewarding careers for them.

For the past three years, Wang has worked on yet another grant, this one with fellow WCER Researcher L. Allen Phelps. The Manufacturing Engineering, Technologist and Technician Education (METTE) project, funded with a $1.2 million NSF grant from the Advanced Technological Education program, is working to improve education for manufacturing workers.

Since 2011, the study has tracked approximately 4,000 students enrolled at several two-year technical colleges in Wisconsin, including Fox Valley, Milwaukee Area, Moraine Park and Waukesha County. The study goals are to identify factors contributing to optimal student outcomes and to assist educational leaders in making program improvement decisions.

“That project has been very rewarding because we’ve been able to directly create change in institutional policies and programs to improve the lives of students at those schools,” Wang said. “The best part is we’ve set up systems that will help these colleges continue to collect and use the data to inform their programs.”

Wang is driven by the hope of directly influencing her students, and as a result, she deeply invests herself in her teaching. She is a two-time winner of her department’s Teacher of the Year award and receives rave reviews from students for her courses on the American community college system and assessment in higher education.

Wang also makes sure to devote herself to supporting the student transfer community, serving as a keynote speaker at UW-Madison’s annual transfer welcome meeting and offering herself as a resource to any student looking for guidance or friendship. Wang says that nothing gets her more excited than seeing a former community college transfer student in one of her graduate-level classes.

“There is nothing like the American community college in regard to its flexibility, adaptability, and promise, potentially anywhere in the world,” Wang said. “In regard to the students it educates, many researchers view them as vulnerable and in need of help. Some of that is true; but the more I’ve studied them, the more I’ve found that they have so much more to offer us than we have to offer them. They are truly inspiring to me.”