- Helena Vine, Lead Policy Officer for England at the Quality Assurance Agency, considers what we might learn from American researchers Lauren Schudde and Huriya Jabbar’s recent study of ‘Discredited: Power, Privilege and Community College Transfer’.
When it comes to the more intractable issues in higher education policy, we’re often tempted to look wistfully overseas to supposedly sunlit uplands where the knotty issue has, at least on the surface, been resolved.
This has never been truer than in the case of credit transfer – the process by which a provider recognises the credit a student has successfully accrued at another institution, exempting them from modules or even whole years of learning that they have already undertaken elsewhere. If I had a pound for every person who’s suggested I look at how the USA does it, I might be able to fund a neat solution here in the UK.
I understand the appeal – the community college system and the transferable nature of credit are much more embedded within the United States than in the UK, even if each state takes a slightly different approach. It’s tempting to see such a system as the ‘holy grail’ of credit transfer models, where students can accumulate and transfer credit between institutions – and where the path of attending a community college before moving onto an institution offering four-year degrees is well-trodden.
Finding a way forward feels particularly pertinent right now. The potential for a coherent and consistent sector-wide approach to credit transfer has been highlighted by growing government aspirations across all four nations of the UK to promote lifelong learning, widening participation and regional economic development. This is why we at QAA published guidance on credit recognition and research into credit transfer practices across the UK last year and why we’re currently working with colleagues across the sector to produce an in-depth study of those practices.
We’ve naturally looked to the US ‘holy grail’ model to inform our thinking about how credit transfer might work under the Lifelong Learning Entitlement in England – and more broadly across the rest of the UK. But rather than discovering an abundance of convenient solutions that we could apply here in the UK, we were struck by the number of challenges and barriers that our systems share. It turns out that the US perhaps doesn’t have it entirely figured out after all.
Credit transfer systems appear difficult for students to navigate in both the UK and the US. Research in the US exposed conflicting sources of information, guidance documentation that is difficult for students to digest, and protocols which place the onus firmly on students to show they have the requisite learning.
These findings may feel all too familiar to those who’ve been engaged in credit transfer processes in the UK, which our own research found could also prove extraordinarily opaque.
In their study of the credit transfer practice across Texas – Discredited: Power, Privilege and Community College Transfer (Harvard, 2024)– Lauren Schudde and Huriya Jabbar refer to this issue as the ‘hidden curriculum of transfer’. They argue that the series of hoops students must jump through almost feel designed to make them ‘demonstrate that they are worthy’. The students most ably navigating the system could do so because they took no information at face value and instead triangulated it across various sources to identify what was accurate. Such an approach indicates a significant amount of effort is therefore required to do something supposedly so essential to the smooth operation of a tertiary education system.
Despite there being much clearer routes between community colleges and four-year degree providers in the United States than those we have between further education colleges and universities in the UK, Schudde and Jabbar’s research identifies an underlying assumption in some institutions that community colleges are of lower quality and their students are not necessarily academically prepared for transfer to higher levels of study.
Academic faculty and administrators at those four-year institutions sought instead to preserve their institutions’ prestige and reputation for selectivity. In doing so, they fostered unwelcoming and unreceptive transfer processes and cultures, inevitably contributing to poorer outcomes for the students involved. Indeed, Discredited cites one administrator at a selective institution who questioned whether the students who failed to navigate its own complex system were the right candidates for such a prestigious place of study.
And in the traditionally hierarchical education system we have known in the UK – and particularly in England – it’s not impossible to imagine that there have been similar pockets of resistance that have impeded credit transfer and student mobility here too.
Delving further into the body of research on credit transfer in the US, we find that attempts to streamline and standardise these processes have often encountered concerns around the impact on institutional autonomy. While state-wide, policy-level initiatives are much more common in the US than in the UK, measures as simple as the introduction of a common system for course numbering have been met with resistance. Similar concerns abound across the UK, where efforts to acknowledge some consistency across provision raise fears of a slippery slope towards external interference in admission policies.
Ultimately, Schudde and Jabbar argue that efforts to improve support for students (and for community colleges) in navigating these transfer processes are insufficient within a system not designed to ease their paths and where the players with the most power are sometimes the ones most resistant to a reformed system.
Their argument rings true in the UK. On an individual level, providers are open and willing to engage with students with prior learning and support them in finding a route into the institution that recognises their potential and sets them up for success. Many are also willing to acknowledge that their practice in this area could be enhanced. But if the conversation continues to happen solely at an individual level, we risk a system which remains disjointed, opaque and disheartening to engage with. In doing so, we will fall far short of our ambitions for lifelong learning, a skills revolution and a more flexible imagination of higher education.
Sector reference points, such as the UK Quality Code and the Credit Framework for England coordinated by QAA, have a strong track record of facilitating appropriate consistency across a diverse sector. They recognise the common ground the sector shares while enabling providers to adapt it to their own context. The same approach could be taken with further guidance around credit transfer. Every provider’s credit transfer policy may include slightly different requirements and limits, but a sector-led agreement coordinated by QAA on what information goes in those policies and how they’re communicated to applicants would go a long way towards easing the burden on learners and providers, who know they need to do more in this space but aren’t sure where to start.
Learning that the US is far from perfect in this area could easily disincentivise action. Instead, I think it demonstrates that it’s not simply a waiting game for slow cultural and system change to emerge. Instead, it shows that, without proactively tackling the entrenched barriers in the system, the challenges continue to linger no matter how smooth and shiny it looks on the surface.
