The nation has an urgent need to create a more seamless pipeline for students to transfer from community colleges and earn four-year degrees.
That was the message at a summit hosted Thursday by the U.S. Education Department, which brought together more than 200 officials from community colleges, four-year institutions, and state governments to discuss what it described as a “broken” system for transfer students.
The department also released new data highlighting the colleges and states with the most effective transfer rates and systems, and how their practices can be models for others.
Students getting stranded between two-year and four-year colleges has led to inequities in higher education and beyond. The process has long been dotted with bureaucratic barriers. Colleges and states often define and label course credits differently, forcing students to retake classes and costing extra time, effort, and money.
“We shouldn’t be surprised when students give up,” said Secretary of Education Miguel A. Cardona in recorded remarks. “We shouldn’t be surprised when students end up in debt with no degree. This is the system we came to fix. If we want to raise the bar for degree completion, then we must reimagine transfer in this country.”
We shouldn’t be surprised when students give up.
Although 40 percent of students transfer at some point in their postsecondary education, they lose more than 40 percent of their credits when they do, according to the Education Department. Furthermore, while almost 80 percent of community-college students intend to earn bachelor’s degrees, only 16 percent of them do so within six years. That rate is even lower for low-income students and students of color.
That’s a major reason for streamlining the transfer process — not just to save time and money, Cardona said, but to address systemic inequities by bringing in a more diverse pool of students to four-year colleges.
“Let’s recognize selective schools can improve diversity by admitting more transfers, and then demand it,” Cardona said.
The Education Department is asking states and institutions to craft clearer policies for how credit transfers work, offer proactive advising and support for transfer students, and utilize data and technology to remove barriers to graduation, according to a department resource sheet.
James Kvaal, who oversees higher education and student financial aid for the department, said the most successful colleges have partnerships with other institutions and strong academic advising. These colleges make the process “as transparent and as automatic as possible,” Kvaal said.
Further Reading
Most community-college students plan to complete a four-year degree, but only a small share actually does so. The problem is worse for Black and Hispanic students.
Some institutions, like Northern Virginia Community College and nearby George Mason University, have partnered to develop curricula that match up course credits, so students don’t take courses at the community college that won’t transfer to their desired four-year degree program. At least 31 states have policies requiring a set of general-education courses that will transfer to any in-state public institution, as well as guaranteed admissions agreements, in which community-college students who earn an associate degree are promised a spot at four-year colleges in the state to pursue a bachelor’s.
The department’s main focus is on what it calls “credit mobility,” or the ability to seamlessly transfer course credits from one institution to another. By helping colleges create partnerships and policies to ensure a common measurement of course materials, department officials hope to help more students earn bachelor’s degrees and, as a result, close racial and income gaps.
“It’s always hard to work together across institutional boundaries,” Kvaal said. “Every college has its own way of doing things. They’re complex organizations and challenging enough to manage the problems on your own campus, but our students often attend multiple colleges. … We’re all in this to help them go on to a better life, and if we’re going to achieve that goal, then we need to collaborate.”
