Transfer has become increasingly complex as higher education and student demographics change. Shifts in the racial and ethnic composition of the transfer student population are important to understand but challenging to measure because race and ethnicity variables are sometimes missing from national datasets. Research that does not allow for the disaggregation of transfer patterns by race/ethnicity, coupled with a dominant view of transfer as being a vertical pattern from a two-year to a four-year institution only, fails to provide a complete picture of transfer pathways that include alternative patterns. Also, because this research on transfer is so focused on vertical transfer, which we refer to as one-to-one transfer, we have a limited understanding of how students who pursue alternative transfer patterns differ from the traditional vertical transfer students. [For Data Note 2, see ED608150.]