College transfer

College transfer is the movement of students from one higher education institution to another and the process by which academic credits are accepted or not accepted by a receiving institution.

Background

College transfer and articulation involve planned and unplanned movement of students among institutions of higher education. Planned transfers may be facilitated by carefully negotiated articulation agreements between institutions, and enable students to start an academic program at one institution with the knowledge that they will continue their program and obtain their academic credential at another institution. It is important to note that not all planned transfers are based on such prior institutional arrangements, and that students may independently plan to transfer from one institution to another without having complete knowledge of the credit-acceptance policies of the institution to which they intend to transfer.

Unanticipated factors and the general mobility of our society create numerous circumstances under which students must move from one institution to another without prior planning. Reasons for such movements can range from mismatches between students and institutions, employment, military movement, to geographic relocations by the families. The fundamental challenge with college transfer, whether planned or unplanned, is to aggregate coursework conducted at different institutions with different academic policies, different curricula, and different levels of expected rigor into an academic credential that the issuing institution can stand behind. College transfer is complex, because disparate and sometimes non-comparable coursework is brought together, often without prior involvement of the institutions from which the student enrolls and expects to graduate.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), in 2005 nearly 60% of college graduates in the United States who completed undergraduate degrees had attended two or more institutions prior to graduation. Roughly 2.5 million students transfer every year. Student mobility spans institutional structures, differing policies and practices often extending college degree completion by an average of one semester according to the GAO in a report to Congress in October 2005 [http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d0622.pdf"Postsecondary Institutions Could Promote More Consistent Consideration of Coursework by Not Basing Determinations on Accreditation", United States Government Accountability Office website] ] .

Who transfers

Transfer students are no longer only young people who, because they wanted to stay close to home for two years after high school – for financial reasons or reasons of convenience—attended a local two-year “junior college” or community college before transferring to a senior four-year institution. Today, nearly 60 percent of community college students are over the age of 22. Sixteen percent of all community college students are in their thirties; 10 percent are in their forties; and 5 percent are in their fifties or older. College transfers may occur as "vertical transfers," typically movement from a two-year college to a four-year college or university, or "horizontal transfers," involving movement between two institutions at the same level. Horizontal transfers are also referred to as “lateral transfers” – students who transfer from a two-year school to another two-year, or from a four-year school to another four-year. There are also “reverse transfers” – students who start at a four-year school but graduate from a two-year school. And, there are “swirling” transfers – students who are enrolled in two or more schools simultaneously. While it is still true that more students at two-year colleges transfer–about 42 percent—than those at four-year institutions—about 23 percent—one-third of college seniors have transferred at some time in their career. [ [http://www.chea.org/pdf/transfer_state_02.pdf Statement to the Community: Transfer and Public Interest] , Council on Higher Education Accreditation, November 2000]

The college transfer process

The college transfer process can be divided into four main parts: what transpires prior to a college transfer, what transpires during college transfer, what transpires after college transfer and what proactive efforts are managed to help define academic pathways and agreements between institutions to streamline college transfer.

Prior to college transfer, a student may engage and receive different levels of advising and counseling from an institution they attend. The advising process has an impact on the course enrollment decisions a student makes, which often leads to expectations that course work will transfer or not, depending upon the acknowledged student aspirations and goals. Often, a student changes goals and aspirations as a result of their course exposure. During college transfer, a student typically applies to a college or university as a prospective student. Different than traditional applicants, a transfer student's academic history is evaluated. This involves enrollment, transfer professionals and the faculty, and requires an in-depth analysis of every course taken by a student at another college or university and/or also including the evaluation of prior life experiences. A college transfer student applying to another college or university, must request academic transcripts from each institution they attended. Each potential receiving institution must wait until they receive the academic transcripts, assemble them by student and match them to the application.

The transcript and course evaluation process can be divided into three distinct stages which result in judgments independent of the student. First, an assessment of the quality of the course must be made. Second, the course must be evaluated on the basis of its comparability to courses at the receiving institution. Finally, the coursework for which credit is granted must be determined to be applicable to the program of study for which the student has applied.

For purposes of ensuring student success in handling the level of difficulty in the targeted academic program and the course work required of it, and protecting the integrity of academic credentials, all three judgments must be made for credit to be granted for the transfer student and to avoid having the student take the required courses as documented. Courses of poor quality, courses for which the receiving institution has no general counterpart, and courses that simply do not apply to the program of study being sought should not, and are not, typically counted toward degree requirements. This standard benefits students by ensuring that they are not inappropriately placed in programs of study and courses for which they are ill prepared. Concrete determinations with regard to the three-part analysis described above can range in difficulty. Transfer professionals at institutions with significant transfers-in often have a course-by-course understanding of academic offerings of their sending institutions. This course-level understanding is typically arrived at through intensive reviews of course syllabi, textbooks and supplemental materials used in courses, knowledge of faculty and their qualifications at sending institutions, and lengthy consultations with departmental faculty at the receiving institution in connection with each course. Expensive and labor-intensive as sounds, this process represents the ideal method of course credit evaluation and decisions.

Once a particular course from a specific institution has been evaluated, if it is encountered again on a different student’s transcript, the same course credit decision can be applied until the course content changes. At many institutions, evaluations are captured in course equivalency tables or databases that are available to evaluators as a means of expediting the process.

At most institutions, however, the process is entirely manual, and is driven by the experience and knowledge of expert evaluators. This further complicates how a student can be advised at sending institutions, since much of the knowledge on how course work will count, is not readily available to the advisers or students at sending institutions. Usually in the movement from one institution to another, students are evaluated and receive all, partial or no transfer credit for completed courses already taken. The evaluation usually is preliminary prior to enrollment and won't be official until after the student is enrolled and the full degree audit report or checklist is completed and delivered to the student. As a result of the time lapse, students often learn they need to take additional course work or re-take course work that was not sufficient to meet the degree requirements for their selected program of study. Institutions generally require a minimum satisfactory grade in each course taken. Students should check course equivalency maps and transfer guides to validate how courses in one institution will relate to the potential receiver institution. Even though prior courses may be comparable, it does not mean the receiving institution will count the course credit toward degree completion. Prior courses taken could either be accepted as electives, accepted as filling a degree requirement or not accepted at all.

tate and institutional initiatives

Historically, two-and four-year college transfer and articulation agreements were primarily institutional initiatives rather than state mandates. Now, nearly every state has some policy on college transfer of credits for students moving from public two- to four-year institutions. States and institutions advertise and promote transferability, pathways and methods differently across the education sectors.

State legislatures have enacted bills to mandate state oversight, audit and development of procedures that would provide uniformity and increased transparency. [http://www.aacrao.org/pro_development/transfer.cfm"Transfer and State Articulation State Websites", American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO) Website] ] Yet, there still remains striking differences across the United States because there is no federal or national policy to support college transfer. Much debate has arisen around college transfer from its impact on affordability to how it has extended time to degree.

Student mobility is not just within states though. Some 40% of students transfer across state boundaries. College transfer policies and practices among the states usually avoid the cross state issues. As a result, these differences include not only how policies and practices were initially established, but also their degree of selectivity, grandularity, coverage and uniformity is applied in practice at the institutional level.

There is no single model of college transfer and course articulation processes can be identified as the universal standard or even as the preferred model. In the United States, most states employ a combination of approaches ranging from informal efforts of transfer professionals that try to do right by the student, to more formal institution-based agreements, to state-mandated policies. College transfer has been very problematic and costly to students, institutions and the states subsidizing higher education. States such as Florida, Minnesota, Ohio, Arizona, New Jersey, Indiana, Illinois, Washington, California, Texas and Pennsylvania [http://www.pdenewsroom.state.pa.us/newsroom/lib/newsroom/01-31-07_Shaw_Testimony_on_Act_114_Transfer_and_Articulation.pdf"Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Department of Education, Remarks by Dr. Kathleen M Shaw, Deputy Secretary of Postsecondary and Higher Education, January 31, 2007, Senate Education Hearing", Pennsylvania State Government Website] ] have stepped in to define regulations, methods and standards of practice for institutions to follow when evaluating college transfer applicants.

National to regional accreditation transfer issues

Transferring credit from nationally accredited higher education institutions to institutions which have regional accreditation has proved particularly problematic. Regionally accredited schools are generally non-profit and academically oriented. Nationally accredited schools are predominantly for-profit and generally offer vocational, career or technical programs. Every college has the right to set standards and refuse to accept transfer credits. However, if a student has gone to a nationally accredited school it may be particularly difficult to transfer credits (or even credit for a degree earned) if he or she then applies to a regionally accredited college. Some regionally accredited colleges have general policies against accepting any credits from nationally accredited schools, others are reluctant to because they feel that these schools' academic standards are lower than their own or they are unfamiliar with the particular school. The student who is planning to transfer credits from a nationally accredited school to a regionally accredited school should ensure that the regionally accredited school will accept the credits before they enroll in the nationally accredited school. [http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/10/19/transfer "Demanding Credit", Inside Higher Education website, dated Oct. 19, 2005 by Scott Jaschik] ] [http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/02/26/transfer "Tussling Over Transfer of Credit", Inside Higher Education website, February 26, 2007 by Doug Lederman] ] [http://www.useducation.com.pk/stpages/typesofaccreditation.html "Types of Accreditation", Education USA website] ] [http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/education/courses/distancelearn-09.html "What is the Difference Between Regional and National Accreditation", Yahoo! Education website] ]

ee also

*Community college
*Articulation (education)
*Educational accreditation

References