School or Student? A Mixed Method Analysis on Reddit Data for Transfer Barrier Identification

• In Event: GIG ECONOMY and SOCIAL MEDIA RESEARCH: Precarity, Policy, and Platform Governance: Unintended Consequences in Digital and Institutional Ecosystems

Abstract

This study examines the issues that college transfer students experience using Reddit posts. We utilized BERT embeddings, UMAP, and HDBSCAN to cluster topics, and VADER sentiment analysis and manual review to identify two categories of issues: student-centered (e.g., mental health, identity-based exclusion) and school-centered (e.g., credit transfer, advising). This "School vs. Student" viewpoint introduces a new approach to evaluate advising and policy equality. To assess dependability, we used the same procedure to analyze survey data from 161 computing transfer students. Reddit data provided more in-depth and nuanced insights than the surveys.

Authors

• Phuong Minh Nguyen, Texas A&M University-Victoria

• Donnoban Israel Maldonado, SUNY Old Westbury

• Cheyenne Ty, California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt

• Yun Wan, University of Houston-Victoria

• Xiwei Wang, Northeastern Illinois University

• Sherrene Bogle, Cal Poly Humboldt

• Palvi Aggarwal, University of Texas at El Paso

• Shebuti Rayana, SUNY at Old Westbury