This quantitative study examined how social capital and finances influenced community college students' intent to transfer to a four-year institution within STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields. Focusing on the community college students enrolled in a rural midwestern state, the authors employed a structural equation modeling to investigate a set of large-scale survey data. The authors identify the factors related to social and cultural capital, finances, and external factors that pull students away from their studies. This was done to determine the relationships among these predictors and their direct and indirect effects on transfer intentions. Cabrera, Nora, and Castaneda's (1992, 1993) integrated model of student retention was utilized to build the hypothetical model for this study. Significant findings from the study included a strong direct effect on the transfer intention from social capital, and a smaller effect from family encouragement, work-study, and parent education. The final model also identified social capital factors related to parental education levels, family encouragement, parent involvement in high school, and access to institutional agents. Debt aversion did play a role in the model, although not a part of social capital as originally hypothesized. Implications for policy, practice, and future studies were summarized based on the findings.