Why Covid-19 Could Force Colleges to Fix Their Transfer Problems

This article was made possible with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Leaving New Jersey was part of the college adventure when Naudia Johnson started her freshman year at Johnson & Wales University, in North Miami. She loved its program in entrepreneurship, the friends she made in the Black Student Union and international business club, and the balmy breezes that wafted through the palm tree-lined walkways.

Even with her scholarship, tuition at the private university was way more than she would have paid if she’d attended a state college back home. But that was a different time, when 18-year-olds’ decisions weren’t shaped by fears of financial crisis or losing a loved one to a pandemic.

When the university told students in late March that they needed to evacuate, Johnson hurriedly packed up her belongings, locked them in storage, and tapped her savings to book a flight home.

Chances are, she won’t be going back.

Johnson hopes to transfer to a public college in New Jersey — her top choice now is Stockton University — to save money and be closer to home. Her parents are both registered nurses working long hours in an emergency room that’s seen an influx of Covid-19 patients. “Their hours are constantly fluctuating,” Johnson said. “I don’t know when I’m going to see them, and when I do, it’s a blessing.”

Thousands of students share the fiscal, family, and academic concerns that weigh heavily on Johnson as they decide which college — if any — makes the most sense this fall. With so many families facing a sudden loss of income, some students who were planning to attend out-of-state or private institutions are taking another look at less-expensive public regional colleges, said Mildred García, president of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. That could mean an influx of students looking to transfer, putting more pressure on enrollment-hungry institutions to fix a long-broken system.

The flood of transfers is even more likely if courses remain mostly online. One survey found that 35 percent of students said they planned to withdraw from their current college if remote learning was the only option. Many said they’d attend a community college instead.

That could be a good move for some students, who will benefit from lower tuition, smaller classes, and a chance to be closer to family. But every pivot in a student’s education path opens up cracks where credits can fall through.

The U.S. government’s General Accounting Office estimated in 2017 that transfer students lost, on average, 43 percent of their credits. Retaking courses costs students time and money. It can also use up their eligibility for financial aid if they take too many credits without making satisfactory progress toward their degrees.

This year, the pandemic threatens to magnify inequities that already plague the transfer system. Data on community college students, who make up about half of the transfers to four-year colleges, show that eight out of 10 aspire to earn a bachelor’s degree, but only 13 percent do so, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. For lower-income students, it’s more like one in 10.

“The students who are least likely to come back are the ones we’re trying hardest to bring in,” said Ed Venit, who leads student-success research for the consultancy EAB.

At the same time, the stakes have never been higher for colleges to attract new students. Which raises the question: Could the pandemic finally force them to remove the roadblocks that have knocked so many students off course?

‘A Guessing Game’

Some students hope transferring could be a temporary move — a stopgap measure until Covid-19 restrictions are eased.

Consider, for example, a student sent home by the pandemic in the spring semester of his freshman year who learns that one of his parents is now out of work. Meanwhile, his university has cautioned that most courses will probably be online in the fall.

For such cases, “it may make sense for some current freshmen to come home and take core courses at the local community college with the intent of transferring back,” said Janet L. Marling, executive director of the National Institute for the Study of Transfer Students. “But it’s important for students to have clarity on which courses will transfer” and apply toward their degrees. Students, she said, need advising on both sides.

Mark Abramson for The Chronicle

The danger is that without the kinds of intensive, in-person counseling and advising transfer students typically need, they could lose credits and fall off course. Naudia Johnson, for one, said she had trouble finding information about whom she should contact at Johnson & Wales to get her transcript. “For people who want to transfer out, it’s kind of like a guessing game,” she said.

Such transfer requests will pose yet another challenge for four-year colleges, said Richard DeCapua, vice president for academic affairs for OneClass, an online learning platform focused on student success. “They have to set up a process to be fair to students if they want to transfer, but at the same time, they want to keep them from leaving,” said DeCapua, who spent two decades in student affairs, most recently as an associate dean at Boston College.

When students indicate plans to transfer out, the transfer office should be sure to keep contact information so they can be recruited back later. It might provide students a list of courses at their local community college that will apply to their majors and transfer back in when they’re ready.

Without better guidance and quick responses to transcript requests, students changing campuses this fall could sign up for classes that won’t count toward their majors, wasting their sometimes-limited resources and lowering the likelihood they’ll graduate.

Despite a complex web of in-state agreements that spell out which courses transfer between two and four-year colleges, there’s usually no assurance students will be able to return, credits intact, to complete their degrees. That’s especially true if they’re transferring across state lines — a move more students may want to make as the pandemic keeps them close to home.

Complicating matters, many of their classes were offered pass/fail this spring, which four-year colleges often don’t accept for transfer.

“I could see pass/fail as another excuse for colleges not to accept transfer credit from schools,” or at least, not to apply them toward students’ majors, said John Mullane, president and founder of College Transfer Solutions, a research and advocacy group that helps colleges improve services to transfer students.

Mullane said he’s cautiously optimistic the current crisis will force colleges and policymakers to finally shore up the transfer process. “If this problem doesn’t get fixed now,” he said, “then it may never get fixed.”

HomeField Advantage

Some states are counting on students who have moved away to come back to attend cheaper regional colleges. In response to the pandemic, New Jersey unveiled its NJ Come Home campaign, which promises that the participating colleges will accept all credits with a C or better at an accredited out-of-state four-year college. It sweetens the deal by appealing to their sense of duty; transfer students become part of a new state Scholar Corps

with volunteer opportunities to rebuild the state’s economy and social services.

Transferring made sense to Tim Carey. Tuition at Clark University in Worcester, Ma, where he just finished his freshman year, is $48,000; at Montclair State University, where he was just accepted, it’s under $13,000. Montclair State is an hour drive from his home in central New Jersey, compared to nearly six hours from Clark.

Not knowing whether classes would be online or in person, and wanting to be close to home if another outbreak occurred, he applied to Montclair State on a Wednesday evening and was accepted with a scholarship a day and half later. “If I’m paying private-school tuition and it ends up being online, it doesn’t make sense,” he said.

Community colleges are also hoping to see an influx of students transferring from four-year colleges, said Davis Jenkins, a senior research scholar at the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College.

Community colleges are accustomed to having four-year college students drop in, especially over the summer, to take a few courses, but they typically leave it to the students to decide what courses to take, he said. If they want to hang on to them, they should treat short-timers as potential long-timers, Jenkins said. “They should consider how to more systematically advise such students and think more strategically about the courses they could offer to enable students to complete more of their bachelor’s degrees with them.”

Not knowing who will show up and what they’ll need makes it difficult for two-year colleges to plan their course offerings, said Katie L. Winder, dean of instruction at Linn-Benton Community College in Oregon.

During recessions, community colleges typically have to beef up their remedial classes to accommodate older adults who are returning to learn new job skills. But with the current crisis, they may also see a rush of better-prepared students needing more upper-level courses. And with so many expected to wait until the last minute to enroll, community colleges may have a tough time providing the full spectrum of courses they need.

“It will be an interesting challenge to be adding students at both ends” of the academic spectrum, Winder said.

Linn-Benton is one of several community colleges that offer students a chance to enroll simultaneously at Oregon State University. Dual-enrolled students can take up to 10 credit hours at the community college, at its lower rates, before transferring to Oregon State.

“One of the things they love is that they can live on campus, go to football games, and access the student health center,” at the four-year university while they’re still paying community-college tuition, Winder said. If Oregon State’s classes are mostly online in the fall, students are likely to take advantage of the chance to load up on more courses at the partner community college.

Stemming the Flow

Making sure that students who linger in community colleges this fall eventually follow through with their transfer plans is crucial for colleges on the receiving end. They have increasingly relied on transfers to fill their seats as higher-education enrollments across all sectors slid by 9 percent from 2012 to 2019, according to the Clearinghouse Research Center. Enrollments are expected to take a much bigger hit this fall.

With all the uncertainty swirling around the fall term, how can colleges improve their chances of adding more transfer students than they lose?

Colleges need to be flexible and compassionate in accepting credits, according to a series of recommendations that García and the presidents of five other major higher-education associations released last month. They should take into account the “extraordinary burden” students are under and how it might have affected their performance, the statement says.

That kind of flexibility could salvage a path forward for Bossan Abdyyeva, a 22-year-old international student who needs to come up with $12,000 in order to transfer from Northwest College, a community college in northern Wyoming, to Montana State University at Billings. She’s the kind of community-college transfer student whom four-year colleges stake enrollment plans on. Her plans, which began before the pandemic, have been threatened by it.

Abdyyeva scraped together just enough, through a GoFundMe campaign, to pay her spring-semester bill at Northwest College. That unlocked the hold on her transcript so it could be sent to the Billings campus. She’s been accepted there, but worries that, with her summer and fall job prospects falling through because of the pandemic, so too is her ability to afford the university.

Meanwhile, she’s unsure if all of the credits she’s spent the past two years earning will transfer with her and whether, with the stress and uncertainty of the spring semester, she’s maintained the 3.5 grade point average her academic scholarship at Montana State-Billings requires. For Abdyyeva, there’s no one to fall back on.

“I’m from a small village in Turkmenistan where they don’t believe women should get an education,” she said during a break from studying for finals. “My family wanted me to get married and have kids and be a tailor.” She wants to be an ambassador, work on women’s rights issues, and travel the world. But first, she needs to complete her transfer and earn a bachelor’s degree.

It’s a well-worn path strewn with barriers and detours that lead to dead ends. The current crisis, many hope, could provide a catalyst for long-overdue repairs.

So far, the road has been pretty smooth for Johnson, who said a transfer adviser from Stockton reached out to her soon after she applied, walking her through the steps to transfer in. As she waits for her final transcript and word on any financial aid, “it brings back a lot of the anxiety, going through all of that again,” she said. “But it’s just a better option for me to be home now.”

This story is part of a series, Broken Ladder, examining the role of higher education in social mobility. It was made possible by a grant of $149,994 from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has no role in our editorial decision-making.

You can read more stories about social mobility here.