by Jason Lane, Maria Khan & Dan Knox
Within the higher education sector, student transfer is often characterized as a broken pipeline. Despite many years of reforms and numerous national reports detailing the difficulties that students have in transferring between campuses, the transfer ecosystem remains what Insider HigherEd has called “The Bermuda Triangle of Credit Transfer.”
We contend that lack of success in the reform efforts is due to a fundamental failure of past efforts based on how higher education institutions think students should move through higher education rather than how they actually do move through higher education. Recent research has demonstrated that students actually move multi-directionally (with many transferring to community colleges) and that a vast majority of transfer never complete an associate’s degree before transferring to a four-year institution. Yet, most efforts to “fix” transfer focus on developing static and rigid 2+2 articulation agreements between a single dyad of two institutions.
As we noted in our previous blog, many multi-campus university systems have stepped forward in the last decade to rethink how we might be able to move the dial on increasing transfer student success. These systems bring a different “perch and perspective” than individual campuses to addressing transfer. These efforts have focused on creating a multi-campus transfer ecosystem that aims to improve equity in transfer.
The Systems Center of University at Albany- SUNY conducted a survey on behalf of NASH to better understand the work of systems in transfer student success. Higher education leaders from 22 systems and 6 state agencies across 20 states shared information about their current policy work and what policies and practices they have enacted or planned to support successful transfer. The topics covered included policy frameworks, administrative and advising practices, and data collection. The detailed findings of the survey will be shared in our forthcoming white paper.
In this blog, we discuss the top five key policy levers being adopted by systems as identified in the survey. The policies are discussed in descending order of reported adoption. Transfer of credit/or course guarantees and alignment of curriculum were used by 73% and 63% of respondents, respectively, making them the most widely adopted approaches thus far. The next three most popular were used between 40% and 50% of respondents.
Below we briefly discuss each policy and how it may be implemented by systems.
Policy Lever 1: Transfer Credit and/or Course Guarantees
One of the most widespread policies relates to guaranteeing credits and/or courses will transfer between campuses within a system. These policies have, historically, had holes in them that allowed receiving campuses to accept the credits as electives without guaranteeing they would count toward degree requirements or creating additional restrictions that made it difficult for the students to transfer the credits. A result was that students often acquired many more credits needed to earn a degree or simply stopped short of earning the degree. As part of the effort to improve transfer, systems have been working to create greater alignment of curricula (see policy lever 2), standardize how credits are able to move among campuses in the system, and to create more clear guidance to ensure that appropriate credits are counted toward a student’s degree requirements after transfer.
Examples: Colorado State University System, University of Illinois System , University of North Carolina System, University of Wisconsin System, Utah System of Higher Education, SUNY System
Policy Lever 2: Aligning Curriculum
Curricular alignment has risen in popularity as a system-wide policy over the last decade. This alignment is generally categorized by 1) general education courses and 2) courses in the major. Many systems have adopted system-wide general education frameworks, with some going so far as having common course numbering for general education courses. In these arrangements, campuses are often required to accept successfully completed general education requirements or at least not make students retake courses in an area that was already completed. A second effort has been to create system-wide alignment in major. This typically applies to an agreement on intro-level courses in the major that can be transferred between campuses. Most typically this type of alignment has required two-year campuses to align with four-year campuses; though a small number of systems are working to adjust curriculum at both two-year and four-year campuses recognizing the student now move multi-directionally.
Examples: University of North Carolina System , University of Wisconsin System, University System of Maryland
Policy Lever 3: Transfer Credit Appeals
Multi-campus university systems are structured such that a single board (and system administration) may provide oversight of the campuses within the system. One of the movements in policy reform is to create system-level credit appeals processes that allow students the opportunity to appeal a receiving campus’ decision not to accept credit from a previous institution, typically from an institution that is part of the same system. The intention is not to remove curricular oversight from the campuses; but to ensure that students are being treated equitably across the system and that policies are complied with consistently.
Examples: SUNY System , University of North Carolina System
Policy Lever 4: Accepted Grades for Transfer
In order for credits to successfully transfer, institutions typically create minimum grade requirements. The most common minimum grade requirement is ‘C’ (2.0) unless non-transfer students are held to a higher grade in a similar course. In addition, the course has to be similar in content and/or learning outcomes to be accepted at the transferring institution. Concerns have been raised during the pandemic about colleges expanding pass/fail grade options which could obstruct successful transfer in the future, as pass/fail grades are usually not guaranteed for transfer. There is anecdotal evidence that some systems have extended transfer guarantees to pass/fail grades during COVID-impacted terms, though comprehensive data are not yet available..
Examples: Colorado State University System, University System of Maryland, Vermont State College System , SUNY System
Policy Lever 5: Reverse Transfer
An outgrowth of the focus on increasing the production of high quality degrees in the U.S. was the recognition that many students were leaving higher education without a credential even though they had earned enough credits for at least an associate’s degree. The problem was that the credits were earned at different institutions, typically a 2-year and a 4-year, and there was no process to move the credits earned at the 4-year back to the 2-year for the associates degree to be awarded. A number of systems have implemented or are exploring implementing reverse transfer policies that allow students to move credits to a previous institution to count toward a degree. Most often, this is exclusively a process of transferring credits from a four year institution to a two year institution to apply to an associate degree. Several systems now proactively run transcript audits to determine which students might benefit from reverse transfer and seek to notify them of the opportunity.
Examples: SUNY System, University of Illinois System, University of Wisconsin System
Each of these policies works to create a more coherent transfer ecosystem for students, though they each only address a portion of the puzzle. For the complexities of transfer to be addressed successfully, they first require a strong commitment from leadership and faculty, that policies be multi-facetted, and are supported by new technologies, data, and administrative practices