Recent “Beyond Transfer” articles have garnered a lot of attention and discussion among many in the transfer world, including those of us involved in transfer work in Virginia. The reactions to these articles demonstrate just how complex transfer is, and while we may not all agree, the importance of the work is undeniable. One state has taken steps to reduce the complexity and clarify transfer for students and colleges.
The article “The Transfer Credit Myth: How Everything We Know About Excess Credits May Be Wrong,” while narrow in scope, highlighted several important aspects of transfer that should be reiterated: Early and consistent academic planning support is imperative. Additionally, we know program changes, prerequisites and financial aid exhaustion can have serious implications to progress whether a student transferred or not. Furthermore, as highlighted in a response article, we cannot forget about state- and system-level policies that may impact these efforts, for better or worse.
In recognition of these complexities, Virginia passed legislation in 2018 to improve transfer, which addressed three elements: general education, transfer pathways and a state transfer tool. In response and through a collaborative effort between the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV), the Virginia Community College System (VCCS) and two- and four-year institutions, the Transfer Virginia initiative was born. Its goal is to remove barriers while improving credit efficiency, reducing time to transfer and boosting degree-attainment rates.
General education: A two-year institutional general education package, known as the Uniform Certificate of General Studies (U.C.G.S.), was created to apply to lower-level general education at all Virginia public four-year institutions and many participating private four-year institutions.
Transfer pathways: Common curricula have been developed to provide the foundation for the transfer pathways—or student-facing transfer guides—which are created with the goal of mapping associate degree curricula, including the U.C.G.S., to baccalaureate degrees to strengthen credit efficiency and applicability. Each guide includes a curricular section showing the student exactly what to take at both the two-year institution and the remaining requirements at the four-year institution for a true 2+2. There is also a “Transfer Guidance” section that includes information about the college/university, major, admission—including guaranteed admission—as well as important dates, deadlines and links, serving as a one-stop shop for transfer information. There are currently over 500 transfer guides, representing over 30 pathways to four-year institutions, with approximately 150 to 200 guides submitted each year. These work very well when a student has identified a transfer plan. For those who would like to explore further, these and many other resources are available in the portal.
State transfer tool: The Transfer Virginia portal, officially launched in 2021, is designed to be a robust repository to assist students at any point in their higher education journey, including dual enrollment. The portal provides standardized information for more than 60 Virginia colleges—two-year and four-year, public and private—all in one place. Users can compare institutions, explore program listings, find colleges offering their major, see how their coursework transfers, create a portfolio and connect with transfer specialists directly.
For states looking to effect change, a good place to start is identifying commonalities between general education curriculum at both two- and four-year institutions to craft a statewide pathway. However, the work cannot be done in silos. Collaboration and commitment from the two- and four-year institutions and state administrative agencies is vital. For Virginia, legislation ignited the initiative, but the teamwork between all stakeholders keeps the momentum going.
The Beyond Transfer Policy Advisory Board is thinking creatively about financial and reputational incentives to improve transfer and learning mobility. In this article, two of the PAB’s members—Sharon Morrissey and Ron Anderson—who are both seasoned, system-level leaders, share their reflections on what is needed next to accelerate success in transfer and learning mobility.
During the webcast, participants were polled on the following question: “To what extent do you agree that new financial incentives or budgeting models could help institutions to prioritize improving transfer student outcomes?” The audience’s response was positive, with 85 percent agreeing at least somewhat. However, we see some divisions within the data, with 32 percent saying they “strongly agree” and 53 percent saying they “somewhat agree.”
While that data might feel a bit hard to make sense of, it rings true to us. Between us we bring over seven decades of experience as faculty, institutional administrators and system office leaders across three states, Minnesota, North Carolina and Virginia. That experience has taught us that improving credit transfer and expanding learning mobility are some of the most complex challenges facing higher education.
Why is this? For one, improving recognition of learning and credit transfer requires higher education institutions to contend with a wide range of prior learning experiences, including traditional college coursework, high school dual-enrollment courses, career and technical education, work-based learning, military service, industry certification, and more. This implies the participation of numerous learning providers, such as institutions of higher education, high schools, employers and the military. And it involves multiple decision-makers, such as students who choose transfer pathways, faculty who determine what learning to recognize and how to apply that learning to program requirements, enrollment managers who wish to recruit transfer students, registrars who process transcripts, deans and provosts who oversee academic standards, and presidents who are held accountable by policymakers for serving transfer students. In short, there is complexity at every step of the process.
That complexity points to the fact that—as the mixed results of that poll show—if we are going to make true progress on transfer and learning mobility, we must find solutions that appeal to the priorities of multiple decision-makers. As we think about incentives, for example, the incentives that would influence the behavior of a faculty member are not the same as the incentives that would influence the behavior of an administrator. Those responsible for revenue may be more swayed by a policy that would augment an institution’s state appropriation for increased enrollment and graduation of transfer students, while those responsible for curriculum may be more inclined to accept and apply transfer credit to a degree program based on their assessment of how the prior learning aligns to the learning outcomes of their own local courses.
Another key theme of the webcast—and, let’s be honest, nearly every discussion held these days about transfer—was that we must zero in on the credential applicability of prior learning. Past reform efforts have advanced incredible work such as understanding the student experience, increasing transfer student belonging, strengthening advising and creating infrastructure for efforts such as credit for prior learning. All that work is critical and must continue. But we must also double down on how to advance credential applicability of courses and other forms of prior learning. We are not helping transfer students meet their educational goals if we fail to apply their prior learning to program requirements.
Finally, a third theme elevated in the webcast was about shifting culture and mindsets. Achieving increased credential applicability will require a shift away from the current culture that interrogates every aspect of a course or other prior learning experience to find a course-to-course equivalency. Does anyone really believe that a student cannot be successful in a subsequent course, or in the workforce, if they happen to read a different textbook? As the Council of Regional Accrediting Commissions recently elevated, the practice of interrogating the minutiae of courses and other learning experiences should, instead, focus at a higher level, on questions such as:
Does the sum of a student’s learning provide an appropriate foundation to set them up for continued academic success?
Can a student be successful in subsequent learning experiences, with appropriate just-in-time support? How can the institution provide that support?
What data do we have that a student will not be successful in a subsequent course?
Based on our experience working with institutions and systems, we share here three state policy ideas that attend to these themes by 1) appealing to the priorities of multiple decision-makers, in this case both faculty and administrators; 2) zeroing in on credential applicability of prior learning; and 3) nudging broader cultural and mindset shifts.
The first idea is for policymakers to explicitly include credit transfer and applicability within the design of state funding models by pinning rewards to credential applicability of groups of many courses. Right now, some—but not all—states have funding formulas that focus attention on transfer students’ outcomes. Those that do often include metrics such as the rate of students who transfer and bachelor’s degree completion for those who enter as a transfer student.
On their own, these goalposts are too broad and have not yet produced the level of change needed. How can states improve this approach? We think one approach might be for states to collaborate with institutions to build various program-aligned credit thresholds and then reward institutions for applying that credit to degree requirements, such as:
Awarding and applying 15 program-aligned credits: The equivalent of what many refer to as a meta-major, designed to introduce students to a broad program area (e.g., allied health).
Awarding and applying 30 program-aligned credits: The equivalent of roughly the first year of college, often represented by a general education transfer core that is customized to include program-aligned courses.
Awarding and applying 60 program-aligned credits: The equivalent of a typical associate degree—but again, this must be a program-aligned associate degree.
The goal here is for receiving institutions to not pull these credit blocks apart and pick and choose which credits apply. If students have met a threshold and their preparation is program-aligned, they should be advanced toward program completion for all of those credits. The groups of courses students have completed add to more than the sum of their parts. Students are journeying through a learning experience, with a variety of learning outcomes, that when looked at holistically are offering strong preparation for not just subsequent courses, but life and work. The mindset shift here is: Students do not need to have met every single learning outcome addressed in the receiving institution courses to be successful. They need to be prepared enough to be successful in subsequent courses, learning experiences and the workforce.
Second, we encourage state policymakers to couple this policy change with demonstration projects that engage faculty in pedagogy, curriculum design and research. As receiving institutions accept and apply these groups of courses, what just-in-time supports should receiving institutions offer to students to ensure their success after transfer? How are students performing on a number of measures: in subsequent courses, for graduation and in the workforce? Which curricular design assumptions no longer hold? Where might classroom approaches be strengthened and evolved to reflect shifting needs of learners?
Finally, all the findings of this work should be elevated through state recognition awards (ideally coupled with some funding) that promote the visibility and reputation of colleges and universities that are embracing all high-quality learning and moving learners toward credential completion.
Through the Beyond Transfer Policy Advisory Board, we’ll continue to push against the status quo to imagine new possibilities for institutions and learners. Connect with us on Instagram (@beyondtransfer) to stay informed on the board’s latest policy insights and ideas, and visit our website to access prior research reports related to transfer, institutional finance and financial aid, including:
Beyond Transfer Policy Advisory Board. (2023). Affordability Disconnects: Understanding Student Affordability in the Transfer and Credit Mobility Era. See paper with visuals and blog.
Beyond Transfer Policy Advisory Board. (2023). Unpacking Financial Disincentives: Why and How they Stymie Degree-Applicable Credit Mobility and Equitable Transfer Outcomes. See paper with visuals and blog.
How does an initiative achieve sustainability beyond the life cycle of the grants that funded its implementation? This is the question that the transfer initiatives team at the New England Board of Higher Education (NEBHE) set out to answer earlier this month during a convening of higher education leaders from across the New England region.
Background
First launched in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island in 2021 and scaled to Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont in 2024, the New England Transfer Guarantee is NEBHE’s landmark transfer initiative. Associate degree–holding community college graduates can transfer seamlessly to participating four-year schools in the same state with guaranteed admission, provided they meet a minimum GPA set by the receiving institution. There are no application fees or essay requirements for students transferring through this program. As of October 2025, there are 53 participating four-year institutions across all six New England states.
Planning and implementation of this initiative in the six states mentioned above has been made possible through funding from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the Davis Educational Foundation, the Lloyd G. Balfour Foundation and the Teagle Foundation.
As was highlighted in a previous column and further contextualized in the longer-form “Third Annual Guarantee Enrollment Report,” students who have transferred through this initiative are performing well above the minimum GPA requirements receiving institutions set for their admission.
Beyond that, guarantee students are retained at their transfer destination at an impressive rate of 94 percent. Analyzing this annual data has also revealed that many of the students that transfer through this initiative are from traditionally underserved backgrounds, with over 47 percent of students who have enrolled through the initiative being Pell Grant recipients.
The Future of the New England Transfer Guarantee
With the grant-funded phase of this work coming to an end in December 2025 (March 2026 for the grant from the Balfour Foundation), the time is ripe for creating a plan to sustain the guarantee for future generations of students. NEBHE gathered state higher education system leaders from across all six New England states for a hybrid meeting at the Eagle Mountain House in Jackson, N.H.
Those who attended included individuals who lead public two- and four-year systems but also those who represent four-year independent colleges. The meeting was focused on determining NEBHE’s ongoing role in administering the guarantee beyond the life of the grant, and attendees discussed what kind of coalition-based governance structure would assure that the program adapted to future trends in the higher education landscape in a way that preserved its longevity for future generations of students.
Attendees described how the initiative has improved transfer pathways and simplified the transfer landscape for students in their respective states. “I just want to say how much we appreciate it,” Nate Mackinnon, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of Community Colleges, told the group. “From the community college perspective, we’re constantly interested in making sure our students lose as few credits as possible on their pathway.”
Other participants suggested incorporating artificial intelligence and credit for prior learning into the structure of the guarantee and offered examples of successful implementations of these ideas at their institutions.
Next, the meeting’s facilitator engaged participants in a conversation regarding the roles required to sustain the initiative in the long term. In addition to collecting and analyzing student-level enrollment data on an annual basis, NEBHE has committed to continue to publish the annual enrollment report for the New England Transfer Guarantee.
NEBHE will also continue to solicit any updates to the eligible programs that each four-year institution opens to guarantee students. Attendees recommended that NEBHE should engage the webmasters to whom they send such updates each year—to see what will be required for them to continue to keep these student portals up-to-date with information that community college students need to evaluate their transfer choices through the guarantee.
Attendees also expressed an interest in NEBHE’s continued involvement in promoting the initiative to community college transfer advisers on a regular basis by integrating the guarantee into existing statewide meetings and events that focus on transfer. Additionally, attendees saw potential in partnering with third-party student success organizations to reach students and ensure that they are aware of all the options available to them when it comes to earning a baccalaureate credential.
Next Steps
While the convening succeeded in outlining system-level stakeholder priorities, there are still details that must be ironed out. Given each state’s unique higher education landscape, a one-size-fits-all model for community college transfer adviser engagement would be ineffective, highlighting the need for more nuanced state-by-state plans. Outreach to student success organizations to explore opportunities for collaboration is another option that the transfer initiatives team at NEBHE must fully explore in the coming months.
There are questions that remain unanswered for the time being; however, this meeting affirmed that the region’s higher education leaders are committed to ensuring that the guarantee can continue to serve students for years to come.
Rob Johnston is the senior program coordinator for transfer initiatives at the New England Board of Higher Education.
California has established significant goals for postsecondary attainment, with the stated aim of having 70 percent of working-age adults hold a credential of value by 2035. To meet this goal, the state has invested time and resources into the community college system and upward transfer processes, seeking to create affordable and accessible pathways in and through higher education.
A recently published report by the Public Policy Institute of California Higher Education Center found that a large share of community college students are applying to and enrolling in state universities to complete a bachelor’s degree, but equity gaps persist among certain demographic groups.
The data highlights the importance of focusing on early benchmarks of academic progress—including credit completion rates, GPA and the stated goal of transfer—to help students succeed in making the transition to a four-year university. The report also underscores that some transfer students are willing to pay more and travel farther to attend a more selective institution.
The background: California’s public higher education system is the largest and most diverse in the country, the report authors note. The California Community College system includes 116 institutions enrolling over 2.1 million students, and the California State University system consists of 22 institutions educating nearly half a million students. Within the state, the system is the top destination for upward transfer, with 58 percent of community college students going on to enroll at a CSU campus.
Over the past decade, the two college systems have partnered to streamline transfer opportunities. One innovation is the associate degree for transfer (A.D.T.), a group of 40 academic pathways that guarantee admission to students who complete 60 credits toward a bachelor’s degree in a specific major. Another is the CSU Transfer Planner, which provides insights for students to navigate transferable credits, degree programs and campus requirements for transfer.
The report looks at student demographic information, academic progress and participation in transfer pathways such as A.D.T. to identify success indicators in the transfer pipeline.
Methodology
Researchers analyzed data from the CSU Application and Admission Dashboard and longitudinal student-level data from fall 2018 and fall 2023.
In the sample, 48 percent of transfer applicants were Latino, 26 percent white, 15 percent Asian and 4.5 percent Black. A majority were 24 years old or younger, and 75 percent received a California Promise Grant or a Pell Grant while in community college.
The data: The average student spends nine semesters at a community college before applying to a CSU institution, researchers found.
Students are required to complete 60 credits to transfer with junior-level standing, but the median student completed 71.5 credits. Only half of applicants had earned an A.D.T. before applying, and 22 percent earned a local associate degree, meaning about 30 percent of students applied for transfer without a credential.
Students who were 25 or older, Black or financial aid recipients were less likely to meet early milestones and therefore less likely to transfer. Conversely, students with high GPAs were more likely to transfer.
The data also indicated a gap between students eligible for admission at a CSU and those who actually applied. One in five students who completed an A.D.T. never applied to CSU despite having guaranteed admission. Of those, 43 percent enrolled at a different university, many in the University of California system.
In total, 87 percent of A.D.T. recipients declared a transfer goal while at community college, but approximately 20 percent of them didn’t continue on to a bachelor’s degree program.
A majority (92 percent) of all transfers were eventually admitted to at least one CSU, and 63 percent of all transfers enrolled. Three in 10 applied more than once, and almost half of them (47 percent) had their application denied the first time.
“It is possible that these students were initially rejected from the campus of their choice (or to all campuses), took more community college classes, and then gained admission,” researchers wrote. On the flip side, a large share of those whose transfer applications were rejected applied only once (88 percent), and to only one campus (61 percent).
Admissions data also revealed the importance of academic benchmarks early in the student’s community college career. Admission rates for students who took transfer-level math or English in their first year were higher compared to their peers who did not; similarly, students who earned 24 transferable credits were more likely to gain admission to a CSU. Unsurprisingly, students who stated a transfer goal, completed the A.D.T. or had a GPA of 3.25 or higher also had high admittance rates.
One trend researchers noted is that students who were admitted to a CSU but chose to enroll at a different institution were more likely to select a college that was farther away or more expensive, indicating that cost and proximity are not deciding factors. Transfers also enrolled at more selective colleges compared to their peers who opted to enroll at CSU, though some students selected universities with lower graduation rates than CSU.
Over all, transfer students had high graduation rates. Among the incoming fall 2020 cohort, 76 percent graduated with their bachelor’s degree in four years, and 69 percent completed it in three years. About 19 percent of students left the CSU system without graduating three years after enrolling, and these students were more likely to be Black, Latino, male or older or have financial need.
Recommendations: Based on their findings, researchers identified three opportunities for improvement:
Invest in the student’s first year. Interventions including dual enrollment, corequisite English and math courses, proactive advising, and flexible scheduling can promote early momentum and academic success for community college students.
Collect additional data on enrollment decisions. While system data showed that some students opt out of a four-year degree program, researchers emphasized the need for student voices to understand why those admitted would not enroll at CSU. Researchers also noted a need for campus-specific data, “because there is high variation across individual CSUs in both acceptance and enrollment rates.”
Create space at selective campuses and in high-demand majors. “Some of the students who were never admitted to CSU were competitive applicants, but they applied to the most in-demand campuses,” the authors wrote. To increase capacity for these students, researchers suggest flexible course scheduling options, co-locating campuses or expanding online degree programs.
For over two decades, the National Institute for the Study of Transfer Students has bridged two worlds—the researchers who study transfer students and the campus staff who work with them. Located at the University of North Georgia, NISTS has gathered these groups for annual conferences, disseminated resources and research, and doled out awards for groundbreaking work.
Now, university leaders say they can no longer afford to fund NISTS. At the end of October, NISTS, at least in its current form, will shutter.
The institute “has made a lasting impact in improving transfer policy and practice nationwide,” and “its research has informed how colleges and universities support transfer student success,” university officials said in a statement.
But “unfortunately, due to ongoing budget constraints and a realignment of institutional priorities, the university is no longer able to financially support the Institute,” the statement read. “We are proud of the Institute’s legacy and the many partnerships it has built, and we remain committed to serving transfer students through our academic programs and student success initiatives.”
Janet Marling, NISTS’s executive director, said that over the past year, institute staff tried but ultimately couldn’t find a new permanent home for their work—at least for now. She hopes that other organizations will carry on parts of the institute’s work, including its conferences and programs, and house its research and resources so transfer professionals can continue to benefit from them.
“We have heard, time and time again, there just isn’t anyone else providing the resources, the community, the networking, the translation of research to practice in the transfer sphere in the way that NISTS is doing it,” Marling said.
‘A Terrible Loss’
NISTS prides itself on taking a unique approach, connecting staff who span the transfer student experience—from admissions professionals to advisers to faculty members—in an effort to holistically improve transfer student success. Transfer practitioners and researchers worry NISTS’s closure will have ripple effects across the field.
Alexandra Logue, professor emerita at the CUNY Graduate Center, said the transfer process inherently involves multiple institutions working together, including, in some cases, across state lines; about a quarter of transfer students choose to go to a four-year college or university in another state.
Logue appreciated that NISTS conferences offered a rare “chance for people from all the different states in the country to come together” to coordinate and swap best practices. Such programs also allowed transfer researchers like her to share their findings with staff working directly with transfer students on campuses.
“The research that we do is pointless if it isn’t put into practice,” Logue said.
While other organizations are doing powerful work to improve transfer student outcomes, NISTS played a major role in bringing new visibility to transfer students’ needs by making them a singular focus, said Stephen Handel, a NISTS advisory board member.
The institute “added a legitimacy to a constituency of students that often got forgotten,” Handel said. “NISTS was completely focused on that constituency alone, and that’s what made it unique.”
Eileen Strempel, also on the advisory board, said she got involved with NISTS when she served as an administrator at Syracuse University and sought to create a strategic plan to improve transfer outcomes—an area she hadn’t done much work in before.
“I felt like, oh, wow, there’s a brain trust already for me, the neophyte, the learner who doesn’t know very much about transfer at all,” she said. She called the closure “a terrible loss.”
She said NISTS leaders often asked conference participants how many of them had never attended a convention focused on transfer students before; Each year, most hands went up.
“To me, what that moment always crystallized was the important role that NISTS had” in helping practitioners figure out “how they could learn from other colleagues, that they didn’t need to recreate the wheel,” Strempel said.
Those lessons have had downstream effects on students.
Each practitioner came out better equipped “to help hundreds, if not thousands of students,” Strempel said.
Marling said one of the most exciting parts of the work was seeing its impact on students across the country. For example, she watched graduates of NISTS’s post-master’s certificate program in transfer leadership and practice go on to make meaningful changes on their campuses, such as establishing new transfer partnerships with other institutions or revamping training for advisers to improve transfer students’ experiences.
She said she feels “profoundly sad” about NISTS shuttering at University of North Georgia, but she also believes NISTS will live on in some form because of the “tremendous outpouring of support and concern” that followed the announcement of its closure.
“I’m very hopeful that the spirit of NISTS will continue,” whether that’s as an institute elsewhere or “within the many, many transfer champions that are working in higher education across the country. I’m really excited to see how individuals and institutions take what they’ve learned from NISTS and continue to grow their focus on transfer students and continue to provide equitable opportunities for these students.”
More than 32,000 California community college students who earned transfer degrees never applied to California State University despite guaranteed admission, according to a new report that highlights critical gaps in the state’s higher education pipeline.
Marisol Cuellar MejiaThe Public Policy Institute of California study reveals that 21 percent of Associate Degree for Transfer recipients between 2018-19 and 2022-23 failed to apply to CSU. Most concerning, more than half of these students — 32,500 individuals — appear to have abandoned their pursuit of a bachelor’s degree altogether.
The findings come as California races to meet an ambitious goal of 40 percent baccalaureate completion among working-age residents by 2030, a target that depends heavily on improving transfer rates from community colleges.
“When the transfer pathway works, it works,” said Marisol Cuellar Mejia, co-author of the report. “The challenge lies in ensuring that more California community college students are able to get to the point of applying.”
The report identifies another significant loss point: nearly 63,000 students who were admitted to CSU but chose not to enroll never appeared at any four-year institution. This group represents what researchers call “the most immediate opportunity for enrollment gains” at the state university system.
Despite these gaps, the study found high success rates for students who complete the transfer process. Among community college applicants to CSU, 92 percent are eventually admitted to at least one campus, and 76 percent of fall 2020 transfer students graduated by spring 2024. Transfer applications and enrollment remain below pre-pandemic levels. Fall 2024 saw 50,259 new transfer students enroll at CSU, a 6 percent increase from the prior year but still 17 percent below the 2020 peak of 60,529 students. Applications are down 16.4 percent from 2020 levels.
The decline has not affected campuses equally. San Diego State, Cal State Los Angeles, and San Francisco State continued enrollment drops through fall 2024, with the latter two campuses seeing transfer enrollment more than 30 percent below 2020 peaks.
Meanwhile, five campuses — Fresno State, Fullerton, Sonoma State, Monterey Bay, and Chico State — have surpassed their 2020 transfer enrollment numbers. The report notes that CSU is the leading destination for California community college transfers, receiving about 58 percent of students who successfully transfer to four-year institutions. Another 17 percent transfer to University of California campuses, while 25 percent go to private or out-of-state schools.
The study found that the typical CSU applicant spends nine terms enrolled in the community college system before applying. However, students who reach key academic milestones during their first year can apply sooner. Three in ten applicants apply in more than one term, and almost half of these students had all applications denied initially but were admitted later. Among admitted students, 69 percent chose to enroll at CSU.
The California Community Colleges system serves more than 2.1 million students, with most expressing intent to transfer. However, only one in five actually transfers within four years of initial enrollment, meaning even modest improvements could substantially boost four-year college enrollment statewide.
CSU recently committed to increasing transfer enrollment by 15 percent over the next three years as part of its systemwide strategic plan. The move comes as high school graduate numbers are expected to plateau or decline, limiting the pool of first-time freshmen and making community college transfers increasingly important for maintaining enrollment.
California’s community college–to–four-year university transfer pipeline has not delivered the outcomes students need. While 80 percent of community college students intend to transfer, just 19 percent reach a California State University campus within four years. The gap is stark. While there have been numerous statewide efforts to define clear pathways to California State University and the University of California, time and time again it’s taken local innovation and collaboration between sending and receiving colleges to make a real difference.
In Los Angeles, which enrolls a quarter of the state’s students, educators and partners have spent nearly a decade working to support student-centered transfer innovations by focusing attention on implementation of the associate degree for transfer (A.D.T.), a 2+2 pathway intended to offer community college students guaranteed admission to the CSU and an efficient path to graduation. Cross-sector education and workforce collaboratives like the L.A. Compact and the L.A. Region K–16 Collaborative, both convened by UNITE-LA—a nonprofit advancing equitable education and career pathways—have stewarded this work.
In 2017, UNITE-LA brought together leaders from California State University, Northridge; the L.A. Community College District; and other local public and private universities to attempt to solve a common challenge: re-engaging students who stopped out. Recognizing that institutions had a shared responsibility to support this student population, California’s first reverse-transfer program was born.
CSUN Connections went further than traditional reverse-transfer models by helping disengaged students seamlessly transfer their credits to a partnering community college, apply them to an A.D.T. when available and then transfer back to CSUN to complete their bachelor’s with all the benefits of an associate degree. This work required us to take stock of the student data and identify where institutional and systemwide policy barriers, including degree offerings, residency requirements and program misalignments, were costing students additional time and money
Concurrently, campus partners wanted to better understand A.D.T. pathway availability and student outcomes from a regional perspective. Recognizing that the benefits of the A.D.T. unravel when such degrees are not locally available or, when available, rendered inaccessible by enrollment impaction, 16 community colleges and four CSUs engaged in historic data sharing to assemble a clearer picture.
The findings were clear: The A.D.T. was not yielding the desired results. Students who earn the A.D.T. transfer to CSU at half the rate of non-A.D.T. earners. A.D.T. earners often did not complete their degree in two years, and many did not enter CSU in the same field of study. This is due, in part, to the fact that A.D.T.s are not offered locally in many high-paying fields in popular majors like STEM and health. Students of color, especially L.A.’s African American student population, were even less likely to earn the degree, transfer or enter high-demand fields.
In response, UNITE-LA convened a 2021 community of practice focused on improving transfer pathways in the region, asking, to what extent do our educational systems yield inequities in transfer, and for whom? Why is this happening? And how might we bring change? The group surfaced systemic challenges and also revealed that meaningful solutions must be developed at the campus level.
From 2022 to 2024, UNITE-LA piloted a new approach: the Student-Centered Transfer Redesign Process. In partnership with California State University, Dominguez Hills; Cal Poly Pomona; and their feeder community colleges, campus administrators and staff in academic affairs, student services and enrollment management worked together alongside faculty to diagnose barriers and design strategies to improve transfer and bachelor’s attainment.
The process went beyond policy change—it built campus capacity. Participants gained deeper understanding of equity gaps, stronger cross-campus relationships and hands-on tools for problem solving. Empathy interviews with transfer students shifted the focus from what students did or didn’t do to what they experienced, learned and overcame. This perspective is critical to making a student-ready system instead of making students conform to existing policies that don’t serve them.
For example, through the Transfer Redesign Process, CSUDH looked at data-backed recommendations of the statewide AB 928 Committee and assessed the viability of expanding its campus emergency aid program for prematriculated transfer students. Such aid could help incoming transfer students navigate unexpected expenses associated with transfer, such as moving costs, childcare costs and additional transportation expenses like up-front parking or transit pass fees.
In another example, Cal Poly Pomona sought to partner with a feeder community college to implement eTranscript in order to create faster and more consistent transcript and data-sharing processes to support transfer student success. As noted in a recent study of five public institutions in California, despite improvements in available technology, transcript sharing remains a highly manual process that can delay transfer students in receiving final credit-evaluation decisions that are needed for accurate advisement and on-time course registration.
These efforts underscore a core lesson: Localized collaboration is essential for effective implementation of state policy, to diagnose new challenges as they arise, to develop responsive solutions from the ground up and then to advocate for the scaling of innovations that work. The size of California’s higher education systems and complexity of degree pathways require more robust investments to support this type of cross-campus work. State-funded initiatives like the K–16 Collaboratives have provided flexible funding to make it possible in places like Los Angeles. But sustained, dedicated funding is key to turning localized innovation into statewide reforms that reach all Californians. With the state’s Cradle-to-Career Data System, the new Master Plan for Career Education and proposed Education Interagency Council, California has an opportunity to embed these lessons statewide.
Los Angeles is fortunate in that it has a coalition of education leaders willing to cut through the bureaucracy and advance change for the well-being of students. It’s taken data sharing, relationship building, intermediaries and a creative blend of funding, but our students deserve systems that work. Campuses deserve resources to improve them. By aligning funding, policy, practice and partnership, we can ensure their success—and, in turn, the prosperity of our communities and our state.
Adam Gottlieb is the director of postsecondary strategy and policy at UNITE-LA.
Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Remigiusz Gora/iStock/Getty Images
It was legit: She was a beneficiary of the Colorado Re-Engaged Initiative (CORE), which draws on reverse-transfer policies to allow the state’s four-year institutions to award degrees to stopped-out students who have fulfilled the requirements of an associate of general studies degree.
Created by state legislation in 2021, CORE seeks to reduce the share of the 700,000 plus students in the state who have completed some college credits but don’t hold a degree.
“It has always been problematic for me to think that people could have gone three years, three and a half years to college and the highest credential that they have is a high school diploma,” said Angie Paccione, executive director of Colorado’s Department of Higher Education.
For Varkevisser, getting recognized for her years’ worth of credit accumulation was simple; she just had to say yes to the email. “It came out of nowhere, but I have my college degree now,” Varkevisser said.
Colorado isn’t the only state aiming to reduce the millions of individuals who fall in the some college, no degree population in the U.S. And reverse transfer—awarding an associate degree to students who have met the credit threshold—is a relatively simple way to do it, thanks to new technologies and state initiatives to streamline policies.
But one barrier has tripped up colleges for over a decade: working with students to make them aware so they participate in these programs. In Colorado, for example, fewer than 5 percent of eligible students have opted in to CORE.
“I can’t imagine why” a student wouldn’t opt in, Paccione said. “You’ve already paid money; you don’t have to do anything, all you have to do is call [the institution] up and say, ‘Hey, I understand I might be eligible for an associate degree.’ It takes a phone call, essentially.”
Credits but No Credential
In the 2010s, reverse transfer was a popular student success intervention, allowing students who transferred from a two-year to a four-year institution to pass their credits back to their community college to earn a credential.
Experts say awarding an associate degree for credits acquired before a student hits the four-year degree threshold can support their overall success in and after college, because it provides a benchmark of progress. A 2018 report found that most community colleges students who transferred to another institution left their two-year college without a degree, putting them in limbo between programs with credits but no credential.
Now, reverse-transfer policies are being applied to students who have enrolled at a four-year college and left before earning a degree, who often abandon a significant number of credits.
The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center’s latest report on the some college, no credential (SCNC) population found that 7.2 percent of stopped-out students had achieved at least two years’ worth of full-time-equivalent enrollment over the past decade. In other words, 2.6 million individuals in the U.S. have completed two years’ worth of college credits but don’t hold a credential to prove it.
In addition to Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Oregon and Texas are introducing or modifying policies to award associate degrees to stopped-out students who have earned enough credits. The trend reflects a renewed focus on better serving stopped-out students instead of simply pushing them to re-enroll.
“What’s happening at the national level is that folks are recognizing that we’re still not seeing the completion that we want,” said Wendy Sedlak, the Lumina Foundation’s strategy director for research and evaluation. “It’s taking a long time to make headway, so nationally, people are looking back, and looking into what are those initiatives, what are those policies, what are those practices that have really helped us push ahead?”
Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | stphillips/iStock/Getty Images
Obstacles to Implementation
Reverse transfer, while simple on paper, faces a variety of hurdles at the state, institutional and individual levels.
At the highest level, most universities cannot award associate degrees due to state legislation. Before CORE, Colorado universities were limited to being “dual mission” (awarding two- and four-year degrees) or awarding higher degrees, such as master’s or doctorates.
There’s also a stigma around offering two-year degrees to students. Only eight universities are participating in CORE, because “some of the institutions don’t want to be associated with an associate degree,” Paccione said. “They pride themselves on the bachelor’s degree and they want to make sure students complete that.”
Critics of reverse transfer claim that awarding students an associate degree if they fail to complete a bachelor’s gives them an incentive to stop out, but most of these programs require students to have left higher education for at least two years to be eligible for reverse transfer.
Restrictions on student eligibility has further limited the number who can benefit from reverse-transfer programs.
To earn an associate degree retroactively through traditional reverse-transfer processes, students have to begin their college journey at a two-year institution and earn at least one-quarter of their credits there. They are also required to take a certain number (typically 60 or more) and type of credits to fulfill requirements for the degree, whether that’s an associate of arts, science or general studies. So a student who completed 59 credits of primarily electives or upper-level credits in their major would not be able to earn the degree, for example.
While 700,000 students in Colorado have earned some college credit but no degree, only about 30,000 residents have earned the minimum 70 credits at a four-year state university within the past 10 years that makes them eligible for CORE, according to the state.
Most colleges require students to opt in to reverse transfer due to FERPA laws, meaning that students need to advocate for receiving their award and facilitate transcript data exchanges between institutions. This can further disadvantage those who are unfamiliar with their college’s bureaucratic processes or the hidden curriculum of higher education.
In addition, getting up-to-date emails, addresses or phone numbers for students who were enrolled nearly a decade ago can be difficult for the institution.
For some students, the opportunity may seem too good to be true.
Peter Fritz, director of student transitions and degree completion initiatives at the Colorado Department of Higher Education, talked to CORE participants at their graduation ceremony in 2023 who—like Varkevisser’s partner—initially thought the program was a scam. Media attention and support from the governor have helped build trust in CORE. And the state’s Education Department continues to affirm messaging that this isn’t a giveaway or a money grab, but recognition of work already completed.
Thousands of Colorado residents are eligible for CORE, but Varkevisser said she hasn’t heard of anyone in her community who’s taken advantage of it. “Actually, I am the one that’s telling everyone I know, and they go, ‘That’s crazy!’”
Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed
Giving Students Degrees
Between CORE’s launch in 2022 and January 2025, 1,032 stopped-out students earned associates degrees, according to Colorado’s education department.
At Metropolitan State University of Denver, one of the Colorado institutions that opted in to CORE, when administrators began combing through institutional data to see which students would be eligible for the associate of general studies degree, they found 4,256 that could earn an A.G.S.
Another few thousand were eligible for a different degree entirely. If students had completed 15 or more credits at the community college system, “you wouldn’t be eligible for us to award you anything,” said Shaun Schafer, associate vice president of curriculum academic effectiveness and policy development. “Guess what? It’s reverse transfer.”
MSU Denver identified nearly 2,000 students who could receive a two-year degree from their community college. “We sent that back to the different institutions saying, ‘Hey, this person is actually eligible to reverse transfer and get an associate’s from you,’” Schafer said. “We can’t really do anything for them.”
In 2024, 336 students accepted an A.G.S. from MSU Denver, just under 9 percent of those eligible. An additional 130 or so students had reached 120 credit hours or more, so the university offered to help them re-enroll to finish their degree, and 300 had resumed coursework at other institutions.
National data shows policies like reverse transfer are making a dent in the “some college no degree” population by eliminating the barrier of re-enrollment to attain a credential. In the past year, about one in four SCNC students who earned a credential in the U.S. (15,500 students in total) did so without re-enrolling, according to National Student Clearinghouse data.
In Colorado, a total of 2,100 SCNC students completed a credential during the 2023–24 academic year alone, and 800 of those did not need to re-enroll, NSC data shows.
Some states, including Colorado, Michigan, Missouri and Oregon, require institutions to contact upward transfer students to make them aware of their reverse-transfer eligibility. In Texas, students consent to participating in reverse transfer when they fill out their application; they have to uncheck the box to opt out, giving universities leeway to enroll them in the process when they become eligible.
“Students often don’t do optional,” Sedlak said. “When you create additional barriers, you’re not going to see things get done.”
Alyson McClaran/MSU Denver
The first Summer Ceremony for Associate’s Degrees on June 22, 2024, in the Tivoli Turnhalle.
Leveraging Tech
Some universities have implemented new reverse transfer policies that capture students while they’re still enrolled, utilizing technology to expedite the process.
The University of Nebraska system, which includes the Lincoln, Omaha and Kearney campuses, implemented an automatically triggered reverse-transfer initiative in 2023. All eligible students need to do is respond to an email.
“Rather than putting the responsibility on the students to do that work—most of whom are not going to do that work—the system thought it would be better to create a mechanism that would automatically notify students when the courses that they’ve taken have gotten to that threshold,” said Amy Goodburn, senior associate vice chancellor at UNL.
To be eligible, students must complete at least 15 credits at a community college and then transfer to the University of Nebraska. The registrar’s office monitors a dashboard and, after confirming a student completed the appropriate number and type of credits for an associate degree, notifies the student. If the student responds to the email, the university processes the reverse transfer with the prior institution to confirm the associate degree.
“We’re trying to take the need for students to be proactive off their backs,” Goodburn said.
The process is not a heavy lift, Goodburn said, and it boosts the community college’s completion rate, making it mutually beneficial.
Still, the uptake remains stubbornly low.
At UNL, February 2025 data showed that 2,500 students were eligible to participate in reverse transfer, but only 10 percent have opted in. A reverse-transfer initiative in Tennessee a decade ago saw similar numbers; 7,500 were eligible, but only 1,755 students chose to participate and 347 degrees were awarded.
“I’m curious about the other 90 percent, like, are they not doing it because they don’t want it on their transcript?” Goodburn said. “Or they’re just not reading their emails, which is often the case? Or is there some other reason?”
The University of Montana is in the early stages of building its own process for the reverse transfer of stopped-out students. The institution has offered an associate of arts degree for years as part of Missoula College, an embedded two-year institution within the university. Now, through the Big Sky Finish initiative, officials will be able to retroactively award degrees to former students.
Brian Reed, the University of Montana’s associate vice president for student success, has been leading the project, convening with stakeholders—including the president, the provost, Missoula College leaders and the registrar’s office—to develop the process. The goal, Reed said, is to address the some college, no degree population while also investing in state goals for economic development.
Big Sky Finish hinges on a partnership with the ed-tech provider EAB, which has created a dashboard connecting various institutional data sets to identify which students are eligible for reverse transfer. The system highlights former students who have 60 credits or more that fulfill a general studies associate degree, as well as stop-outs who are mere credits away from meeting the requirement.
So far, Montana staff have identified just 11 students who are eligible to earn an A.A. degree and 150 more who are a class or two short of the needed credits.
Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | silverlining56/E+/Getty Images
Putting Degrees to Work
While CORE and similar initiatives are helping students earn a degree of value after leaving higher education, it’s less clear what impact associate degrees are having on students. Is it advancing their careers or getting them re-engaged in college?
About 10 percent of Colorado’s stopped-out students have chosen to re-enroll in higher education to pursue their bachelor’s degree, Fritz said.
For Varkevisser, receiving an A.G.S. degree provided the impetus to re-enroll and work toward a bachelor’s degree. The associate degree also gave her access to a variety of resources for alumni, including discounted tuition rates and career services.
“We recognize that it may not be for everybody to do this as a bachelor’s completion model, but the advantage of having an associate over a high school diploma, I think, helps,” Paccione.
But after students have their degrees, the career benefits and long-term implications for A.G.S. graduates are still murky. Median earnings of full-time, year-round workers with an associate degree are 18 percent higher than those with only a high school diploma, but still 35 percent lower than bachelor’s degree completers, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
In Colorado, the average high school graduate in their mid-20s will earn about $25,000 per year, whereas a graduate with an associate of general studies degree will earn closer to $34,000 per year, according to 2021 data.
“There was an assumption that maybe an A.G.S. wasn’t really worth much, but the data we had on hand locally said there’s not really much difference financially and employment-wise between the different types of associate degrees,” Fritz said.
“I still don’t really know what all [the A.G.S.] can do for me,” Varkevisser said. “I was never not going to go for it once I got the email and found out it was a real thing, but I don’t know what to do with it necessarily.” She’s considered other forms of employment that require an associate degree, such as a laboratory or X-ray technician, while she finishes her bachelor’s degree in mathematics.
In Montana, there’s a slight wage premium for individuals who hold an associate degree compared to those with only a high school diploma, Reed said. An associate degree also opens doors in some career fields, such as bookkeeping.
The University of Montana is hoping to partner with the city of Missoula to identify small businesses looking for credentialed talent so completers can have a career pathway to transition into .
“I don’t think people are going into six-figure jobs after this,” Reed said. “But it’s creating a step toward something else for these folks. They get another job a little higher up, a little higher up, that prepares them for the next thing.”
But an A.G.S. isn’t a great target for workers and it can’t guarantee further education, MSU Denver’s Schafer noted.
“I hate to say it, but it’s a little bit of, it’s a lovely parting gift,” Schafer said. “Here, you have something that you can now show to the world. But how do I [as an administrator] build you on to the next thing when you’ve already stopped out? Maybe that’s the best hope. Even then, maybe it doesn’t work quite as magically as we want it to.”
Transfer students often experience a range of challenges transitioning from a community college to a four-year institution, including credit loss and feeling like they don’t belong on campus.
While many have achieved that goal, they often lacked time to explore campus offerings or felt pressured to complete their degree on an expedited timeline, according to institutional data.
“Students feel pressure to complete in two years for financial reasons and because that is the expectation they receive regarding four-year graduation,” said Linda Adler-Kassner, associate vice chancellor of teaching and learning. Transfer students said they don’t want to “give up” part of their two years on campus to study away, she said.
Institutional data also revealed that their academic exploration opportunities were limited, with fewer transfers participating in research or student groups, which are identified as high-impact practices.
As a result, the university created a new initiative to improve transfer student awareness of on-campus opportunities.
Getting data: UCSB’s institutional research planning and assessment division conducts an annual new student survey, which collects information on students’ demographic details, academic progress and outside participation or responsibilities. The fall 2024 survey revealed that 26 percent of transfers work for pay more than 20 hours per week; an additional 40 percent work between 10 and 20 hours per week. Forty-four percent of respondents indicated they do not participate in clubs or student groups.
In 2024, the Office of Teaching and Learning conducted a transfer student climate study to “identify specific areas where the transfer student experience could be more effectively supported,” Adler-Kassner said. The OTL at UCSB houses six units focused on advancing equity and effectively supporting learners.
The study found that while transfers felt welcomed at UCSB, few were engaging in high-impact practices and many had little space in their schedules for academic exploration, “which leads them to feel stress as they work on a quick graduation timeline,” Adler-Kassner said.
Put into practice: Based on the results, OTL launched various initiatives to make campus stakeholders aware of transfer student needs and create effective interventions to support their success.
Among the first was the Transfer Connection Project, which surveys incoming transfer students to identify their interests. OTL team members use that data to match students’ interests with campus resources and generate a personalized letter that outlines where the student can get plugged in on campus. In fall 2025, 558 students received a personal resource guide.
The data also showed that a majority—more than 60 percent—of transfers sought to enroll in four major programs: communications, economics, psychological and brain sciences, and statistics and data science.
In turn, OTL leaders developed training support for faculty and teaching assistants working in these majors to implement transfer-focused pedagogies. Staff also facilitate meet-and-greet events for transfers to meet department faculty.
This work builds on the First Generation and Transfer Scholars Welcome, which UCSB has hosted since 2017. The welcome event includes workshops, a research opportunity fair and facilitated networking to get students engaged early.
The approach is unique because it is broken into various modules that, when combined, create a holistic approach to student support, Adler-Kassner said.
Gauging impact: Early data shows the interventions have improved student success.
Since beginning this work, UCSB transfer retention has grown from 87 percent in 2020 to 94 percent in 2023. Similarly, graduation rates increased 10 percentage points from 2020 to 2024. Adler-Kassner noted that while this data may be correlated with the interventions, it does not necessarily demonstrate causation.
In addition, the Transfer Student Center reaches about 40 percent of the transfer student population each year, and institutional data shows that those who engage with the center have a four-percentage-point higher retention rate and two-point higher graduation rate than those who don’t.
Do you have an intervention that might help others promote student success? Tell us about it.
This article has been updated to correct the share of incoming students that are transfers at UCSB.
Upward transfer is viewed as a mechanism to provide college students with an accessible and affordable on-ramp to higher education through two-year colleges, but breakdowns in the credit-transfer process can hinder a student’s progress toward their degree.
A recent survey by Sova and the Beyond Transfer Policy Advisory Board found the average college student loses credits transferring between institutions and has to repeat courses they’ve already completed. Some students stop out of higher education altogether because transfer is too challenging.
CourseWise is a new tool that seeks to mitigate some of these challenges by deploying AI to identify and predict transfer equivalencies using existing articulation agreements between institutions. So far, the tool, part of the AI Transfer and Articulation Infrastructure Network, has been adopted at over 120 colleges and universities, helping to provide a centralized database for credit-transfer processes and automate course matching.
In the most recent episode of Voices of Student Success, host Ashley Mowreader speaks with Zachary Pardos, an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley, about how CourseWise works, the human elements of credit transfer and the need for reliable data in transfer.
An edited version of the podcast appears below.
Q: As someone who’s been in the education-technology space for some time, can you talk about this boom of ed-tech applications for AI? It seems like it popped up overnight, but you and your colleagues are a testament to the fact that it’s been around for decades.
Zach Pardos, associate professor at UC Berkeley and the developer of CourseWise
A: As soon as a chat interface to AI became popularized, feasible, plausible and useful, it opened up the space to a lot of people, including those who don’t necessarily have a computer science background. So in a way, it’s great. You get a lot more accessibility to this kind of application and work. But there have also been precepts—things that the field has learned, things that people have learned who’ve been working in this space for a while—and you don’t want to have to repeat all those same errors. And in many ways, even though the current generation of AI is different in character, a lot of those same precepts and missteps still apply here.
Q: What is your tool CourseWise and why is it necessary in the ed-tech space?
A: CourseWise is a spinoff of our higher education and AI work from UC Berkeley. It is meant to be a credit-mobility accelerator for students and institutions. It’s needed because the greatest credit-mobility machine in America, the thing that gets families up in socioeconomic status, is education. And it’s the two-year–to–four-year transition often that does that, where you can start at a more affordable school that gives two-year associate’s degrees and then transition to a four-year school.
But that pathway often breaks down. It’s often too expensive to maintain, and so for there to be as many pathways as possible that are legitimate between institutions, between learning experiences, basically acknowledging what a student has learned and not making them do it again, requires us to embrace technology.
Q: Can you talk more about the challenges with transfer and where course equivalency and transfer pipelines can break down in the transition between the two- and four-year institutions?
A: Oftentimes, when a student applies to transfer, they’ll have their transcript evaluated [by the receiving institution], and it’ll be evaluated against existing rules.
Sometimes, when it’s between institutions that have made an effort to establish robust agreements, the student will get most of their credit accepted. But in instances where there aren’t such strong ties, there’s going to be a lot of credit that gets missed, and if the rules don’t exist, if the institution does go through the extra effort, or the student requests extra effort to consider credit that hasn’t been considered before, this can be a very lengthy process.
Sometimes that decision doesn’t get made until after the student’s first or second semester, semesters in which they maybe had to decide whether or not to take such a course. So it really is a matter of not enough acknowledgment of existing courses and then that process to acknowledge the equivalency of past learning being a bit too slow to best serve a learner.
Q: Yeah. Attending a two-year college with the hopes of earning a bachelor’s degree is designed to help students save time and money. So it’s frustrating to hear that some of these students are not getting their transfer equivalencies semesters into their progress at the four-year, because that’s time and energy lost.
A: Absolutely. It’s unfortunately, in many cases, a false promise that this is the cheaper way to go, and it ends up, in many cases, being more expensive.
Q: We can talk about the transfer pipeline a lot, but I’ll say one more thing: The free marketplace of higher education and the idea that a student can transfer anywhere is also broken down by a lack of transfer-articulation agreements, where the student’s credits aren’t recognized or they’re only recognized in part. That really hinders the student’s ability to say, “This is where I want to go to college,” because they’re subject to the whims of the institutions and their agreements between each other.
A: That’s right, and it’s not really an intentional [outcome]. However, systems that have a power dynamic often have a tendency not to change, and that resistance to change, kind of implicitly, is a commitment not to serve students correctly.
Accreditors Weigh In
The Council of Regional Accrediting Commissions (C-RAC) supports the exploration and application of AI solutions within learning evaluation and credit transfer, according to a forthcoming statement from the group to be released Oct. 6. Three accrediting commissions, MSCHE, SACSCOC and WSCUC, are holding a public webinar conversation to discuss transfer and learning mobility, with a focus on AI and credit transfer on Oct. 6. Learn more here.
So what you do need is a real type of intervention. Because it’s not in any one spot, you could argue, and you could also make the argument that every institution is so idiosyncratic in its processes that you would have to do a separate study at every institution to figure out, “OK, how do we fix things here?” But what our research is showing on the Berkeley end is that there are regularities. There are patterns in which credit is evaluated, and where you could modify that workflow to both better serve the institution, so it’s not spending so many resources on manually considering equivalencies, and serve the student better by elevating opportunities for credit acceptance in a more efficient way.
That’s basically what CourseWise is. It’s meant to be an intervention that serves the institution and serves the student by recognizing these common patterns to credit acceptance and leveraging AI to alleviate the stress and friction that currently exists in affording that credit.
Q: Can you walk us through where CourseWise fits into the workflow? How does it work practically?
A: CourseWise is evolving in its feature set and has a number of exciting features ahead, which maybe we’ll get to later. But right now, the concrete features are that on the administrator side, on the staff or admissions department side, you upload an institution’s existing articulation agreements—so if you’re a four-year school, it’s your agreements to accept credit from two-year schools.
So then, when you receive transcripts from prospective transfer students, the system will evaluate that transcript to tell you which courses match existing rules of yours, where you’ve guaranteed credit, and then it’ll also surface courses that don’t already have an agreement.
If there’s a high-confidence AI match, it’ll bring that to the administrator’s attention and say, “You should consider this, and here’s why.” It’ll also bring to their attention, “Here’s peer institutions of yours that have already accepted that course as course-to-course credit.”
CourseWise compares classes in institutions’ catalogs to identify existing agreements for credit transfer and possible course-to-course transfers to improve student outcomes.
Q: Where are you getting that peer-to-peer information from?
A: We think of CourseWise as a network, and that information on what peer institutions are doing is present. We have a considerable number of institutions from the same system. California is one—we have 13 California institutions, and we’re working on more. The other is State University of New York, SUNY. We have the SUNY system central participating in a pilot. It’ll be up to the individual institutions to adopt the usage. But we have data at the system-center level, and because of that centralized data, we are able to say, for every SUNY institution that’s considering one of the AI credit acceptance requests, give that context of, “Here are other four-year peer institutions within your system that already accept this—not just as generic elective credit, but accept it as perhaps degree satisfying, or at least course-to-course credit.”
Q: That’s awesome; I’m sure it’s a time saver. But where do the faculty or staff members come back into the equation, to review what the AI produced or to make sure that those matches are appropriate?
A: Faculty are a critical part of the governance of credit equivalency in different systems. They have different roles; often it’s assumed that faculty approve individual courses. That’s true in most cases. Sometimes it’s committees; different departments will have a committee of faculty, or they may even have a campus standing committee that considers this curricular committee that makes those decisions.
But what CourseWise is doing right now to incorporate faculty appropriately is we’re allowing for the institution to define what is that approval workflow and the rules around that. If it’s a lower-division statistics class, can your admission staff make that decision on acceptability, even if it’s not existing in a current agreement?
Under what circumstances does it need to be routed to a faculty member to approve? What kind of information should be provided to that faculty member if they don’t have it, making it easy to request information, like requesting a syllabus be uploaded by the sending institution or something to that effect?
Oftentimes, this kind of approval workflow is done through a series of emails, and so we’re trying to internalize that and increase the transparency. You have different cases that get resolved with respect to pairs of courses, and you can see that case. You can justify why a decision was made, and it can be revisited if there’s a rebuttal to that decision.
Now, over time, what we hope the field can see as a potential is perhaps for certain students, let’s say, coming from out of state; it’s more a faculty committee who gives feedback to a kind of acceptance algorithm that is then able to make a call, and they can veto that call. But it creates a default; like with ChatGPT, there’s an alignment committee that helps give feedback to ChatGPT answers so that it is better in line with what most users find to be a high-quality response. Because there’s no way that we can proactively, manually accept or evaluate every pair of institutions to one another in the United States—there’s just no FTE count that would allow for that, which means that prospective students from out of state can’t get any guarantee if we keep it with that approach.
Faculty absolutely have control. We’re setting up the whole workflow so an institution can define that. But one of the options we want to give institutions is the option to say, “Well, if the student is coming from out of state or coming from this or that system, you can default to a kind of faculty-curated AI policy.”
Q: That’s cool. I’ve heard from some colleges that they have full teams of staff who just review transcripts every single day. Having a centralized database where you can see past experiences of which courses have been accepted or rejected—that can save so much time and energy. And that’s not even half of what CourseWise is doing.
A: Absolutely, and we work closely with leadership and these institutions to get feedback. And one of the people involved in that early feedback is Isaiah Vance at the Texas A&M University system, and he’s given us similar feedback where, if you have a new registrar or a new leadership that comes in, and they want to know how good the data is, they want that kind of transparency of how were decisions made, if you have that transparency in that organization to look that over, it can really help an institution get comfortable with those past decisions or decide how they should change in the future.
Q: What are some of the outcomes you’ve seen or the feedback you’ve heard from institutions that are using the tool?
A: Wehave a study that we’re about to embark upon to measure a before-and-after change in how institutions are doing business and how much it’s saving time or not, versus a control of not having the system when making these decisions.
We don’t have the results of that yet. We do have a paper out on where articulation officers, for example, are spending their time. They’re spending a lot of time on looking for the right course that might articulate. So we definitely have identified there is a problem. It’s an open question to what degree CourseWise is remedying that. We certainly are working nonstop to remedy it, but we’re going to measure that rigorously over the next year.
Some early feedback is positive, but also interesting that institutions, many of them, are spending a lot of time getting that initial data uploaded, catalog descriptions, articulations and the rigorousness and validity of that data. Maybe it’s spread across a number of Excel spreadsheets at some institutions—that problem is real—and so I think it’s going to take a field-level or industry-level effort to make sure that everyone can be on board with that data-wrangling stage.
Q: That was my hypothesis, that the tool has a lot of benefits once everything’s all set up and they’ve done the labor of love to hunt down and upload all these documents, find out which offices they’re hiding behind.
A: There are a number of private foundations, funders who are invested in that particular area. So I’m optimistic that there’s a solution out there and that we’ll be a part of that.
Q: I wonder if we can talk about how this tool can improve the student experience with transfer and what it means to have these efficiencies and database to lean back on.
A: Right now, most of the activity is with the four-year schools, because they’re the ones uploading the articulations. They’re the ones evaluating transcripts. But in the next four months, we’re releasing a student-facing planner, which will directly affect students at the sending institutions.
This planner will allow a student who’s at a community college to choose what destination school and major they’re interested in that’s part of the CourseWise network. Then [CourseWise provides] what courses they need to take, or options of courses to take that will transfer into the degree program that they’re seeking, such that when they transfer, they would only have to do the equivalent of two full years of academic work at that receiving school.
It would also let them know what other majors at other institutions they may want to consider because of how much of the credit that they’ve already taken is accepted into the degree programs there. So the student may be 20 percent of the way in completing their initially intended destination program, but maybe they’re 60 percent of the way to another program that they didn’t realize.
Q: What’s next for CourseWise?
A: So the student part is the navigation, the administrator articulation expansion and policy for expansion is creating the pathways; you need a GPS in order to know what the paths are and how to traverse them as a learner. But also states—I mentioned regularities—there are commonalities in how these processes take place, but there’s also very specific state-level concerns and structures, like common course numbering, credit for prior learning, an emphasis on community colleges accepting professional certificate programs and so forth.
I think the future is both increasing that student-facing value, helping with achievement from the student point of view. But then also leveraging the fundamental AI equivalency engine and research to bring in these other ways of acknowledging credit, whether it’s AP credit or job-training credit or certificates or cross-walking between all these different ways in which higher education chooses to speak about learning, right?
If you have a requirement satisfied in general education in California, how do you bring that to New York, given New York’s general education requirements? Are there crosswalks that can be suggested and established with the aid of AI? And I’m excited about connecting these different sorts of dialects of education using technology.
