July 17

‘Emergency’ Data Request Raises Suspicion

Stymied in its efforts to alter federal laws and regulations to make it easier for students to transfer academic credits from one institution to another, the U.S. Education Department plans an “emergency” survey of federal Pell Grant recipients that seems designed to build a case that changes are necessary. The request has agitated some higher education officials, who questioned both the premise and the purpose of the department’s information expedition.

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The department announced in a notice in Wednesday’s Federal Register that it had sought emergency authority from the White House Office of Management and Budget to spend $375,000 to survey Pell recipients who transferred from one college to another from 2004-5 to 2005-6 about their experiences in trying to transfer academic credits between institutions. Participants, who would receive $50 each for answering the department’s questions, will be asked about how many courses they sought to transfer from their original institution to the next, how many were accepted and rejected for transfer, and how much it cost them, and how much any “extra courses” cost them, in dollars and delayed graduation.

The purpose of the survey, department officials said in their request to the budget office for approval of the expenditure, was to gather information to better determine whether significant numbers of students are unable to transfer credits, and if so, why. “The Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education found anecdotal, but frequently mentioned, evidence that transfer students experience barriers due to the denial of credits that they earned at their previous institution,” department officials wrote in their petition to the budget office. “Such barriers both increase the cost of education and delay the entry of the students into the workforce. ED’s primary need now is for a descriptive study to determine what barriers exist and the extent to which they are a problem. Later, ED may consider a pilot project to work on removing some of the barriers.”

The department said it had sought permission from the budget office to collect this information on an “emergency” basis — which would mean that it could do so without going through the usual process of seeking public comment on the purpose and composition of the survey — by today. Such an expedited approval is necessary, its Federal Register notice asserts, because Congress is about to pass legislation to renew the Higher Education Act that “will likely include new requirements for disclosing institutions’ transfer of credit policies,” and the department’s ability to interpret the law and draft regulations to carry it out “would be best informed by the results of this study.” The survey will also, department officials suggest, “assist in improving the Department’s customer service functions for students who receive federal student aid for the 2009-10 school year.”

Several college lobbyists were troubled by the department’s surprise request on several fronts. They do not dispute the idea that transfer of credit is a problem for higher education, and they don’t question the notion that it would be helpful for the federal government to have more information about the nature and extent of the problem. But that’s about where their agreement with the Education Department ends.

First, they question the underlying purpose of the request. The transfer of credit issue has become enormously entangled in politics, because while the heavy majority of students who have trouble transferring their credits are believed to be at community colleges, the Spellings Commission and the department focused their proposed solutions to the “transfer of credit problem” on federal attempts to ensure that colleges do not automatically reject the academic credits of students from institutions that are nationally accredited, the vast majority of which are for-profit career colleges. (Officials of nationally accredited institutions argue that such rote rejection is unfairly discriminatory and destructive.)

That resulted in a major brouhaha on the Education Department panel that negotiated possible changes in federal rules governing accreditation last year and in Congressional deliberations over the Higher Education Act, and led Congress to propose blocking the department from promulgating regulations on the transfer of credit issue. The Higher Education Act legislation, as currently drafted, would merely require colleges to publish their policies on transfer of credit.

To those who opposed the department’s effort to impose a federal solution on the transfer of credit issue, the department’s latest tactic appeared to be a last-ditch attempt to resuscitate the issue, and from a certain perspective, before the Bush administration leaves office. They noted, for instance, that the agency’s request asks questions that are designed to tease out whether students in “career and technical education” courses are more likely to have their credits rejected.

“This is an example of trying to develop facts to support a policy that has been rebuked,” said Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admission Officers. “It is an outright case of abuse.”

Nassirian and others said that the department’s attempt to skirt the standard public comment and approval process seemed designed to obscure the fact that the survey was designed to produce just enough information to let the department make the case it wants without shedding full light on the real issues.

The survey, for instance, asks students whether they had to take “extra courses” at their second institutions because the colleges refused to accept courses from the first, and if so, how much it cost them to do so. But it stops there, Nassirian said, instead of asking the “obvious follow-up question": “Do you think the courses were the same?” To the extent the content of the courses was meaningfully different, he said, it would have been perfectly legitimate for the receiving institution not to accept the credits.

“This is a highly tendentious, one-sided set of questions,” Nassirian said. “With the right questions, you can get people to admit that toxic sludge is good for them.”

Department officials said they were unable to respond to questions about the survey and the emergency basis of the request, because those responsible were en route to Chicago for a higher education summit at which Education Secretary Margaret Spellings and Under Secretary Sara Martinez Tucker are expected to try to summarize the department’s progress in carrying out the work of the Spellings Commission as Spellings and her team prepare to leave office.

It is not clear whether the budget office has approved, or will approve, the department’s request. But the White House office did express skepticism about one major thesis behind the department’s information gathering quest. When department officials initially submitted a request for expedited approval to OMB, they portrayed it mostly as a method of assessing “customer satisfaction.”

In a June 10 e-mail message to Education Department officials, a budget office aide rejected the idea that it was primarily designed to help the department gauge the quality of its work. “...[T]he results of this survey will be used to make policy decisions and analyze how successful different categories of students are in transferring course credit,” the aide wrote. “This is the kind of collection that would benefit from the full ICR process, including public comment.”

— Doug Lederman

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Comments

Now That’s an Emergency!

How on earth the Department can consider this an “emergency” requiring public funding at a time like this is beyond me. Most folks involved in higher education discover very early in their professional careers that the meaning of a “degree” or its component “credits” are NOT universally defined (no matter how much some would like them to be). They vary widely from institution to institution. Sorry Department of Ed! The degree, the course, the credit and the accreditation process, itself, are subjective entities (and, in many ways, they should be). Leave the final decisions regarding transferability of college credits where they belong...in the colleges! Accept the grey complexity of it all and deal with it! Now let’s move onto something a little more important, please...

Wilberforce, at 8:10 am EDT on July 17, 2008

Let’s not be hasty

“Most folks involved in higher education discover very early in their professional careers that the meaning of a “degree” or its component “credits” are NOT universally defined.”

Undoubtedly, and unfortunately, a true statement. It’s incredibly similar to the common argument used against learning assessment in higher education, and it’s not really an acceptable argument in either case.

In an ideal world, students would not transfer. There’s evidence that indicates that transfer activity correlates strongly with never completing a degree. We do not live in an ideal world, however. Students get bad advice, they make bad choices, or some combination of these.

But the transfer of credit issue is rarely clear-cut, even at a single institution. I could share countless horror stories. I’ve seen students who were mislead by people at their originating institution, having been told that all of their credits would transfer. I’ve seen institutions refuse to accept credits simply because they come from the “wrong type” of institution. I’ve seen students who got transfer credits for courses that they never should have because an articulation agreement existed between the two schools and the courses in question had not been re-evaluated in years.

All of this impacts the students far more than it does the institutions. It seems to me that we in higher ed forget this once in a while. While I shudder at the thought of a “student as customer” model, I also recall that without students, my job as a faculty member would be...non-existent. Perhaps if higher ed appeared to be a bit less arbitrary and ethereal and a bit more transparent, those on the outside would not view us with such contempt. Do I want federal regulation on credit transfer? I do not. But it’s another case of higher ed needing to fix a real problem rather than just saying, “we’re highly educated, we know what we’re doing, trust us.”

JB, at 9:15 am EDT on July 17, 2008

Degree as Bucket

Decisions about transfer credit should be grounded in academic integrity. The transferring institution should not make promises it cannot keep. The accepting institution should make decisions based on syllabi and content (I’ve seen the snooty faculty who don’t want to grant credit simply based on their personal impressions of a school) — but if data show repeatedly that students who have taken a particular course at another institution are seldom able to progress successfully — then they have the right to not accept the credit. And of course, any of us involved in transfer credit have had to deal with the student who took any number of vocational and/or remedial courses and can’t understand why it won’t all apply to the Bachelor of Engineering. At the end of the day — it’s the name of the institution that grants the degree on the dimploma — that institution does have the right to determine what makes up its own degree. Lawmakers and departments of education too often perceive a degree as a bucket of credits to fill up — the notion of academic coherece or integrity do not factor in. This is an attempt at public policy by anecdote and the apparent structure of this survey will not add any true validity to the argument — just more anecdotes from disgruntled students — many of whom probably were ill-prepared for four-year work and/or made poor choices at their initial institution. But — we do need to get our own houses in order — by working with faculty to make reasonable and unbiased decisions on equivalencies and to publish equivalencies clearly on line.

EM, at 9:35 am EDT on July 17, 2008

Sara Tucker strikes again

What astonishing arrogance from these people.

Neither the House bill nor the Senate bill move anywhere near the direction that Ms. Tucker would have the federal government move.

Both bills simply require the transparency of requiring all institutions to publish their transfer of credit policy, exclusions and all.

There is nothing to interpret or regulate on that.

While it would be very legitimate for the Department to do a comprehensive study on the issue to inform the next reauthorization, this is a patent attempt to build a false case for their failed policy proposal.

One half of the issue is indeed understanding the extent to which student transfers of credit are approved and denied. But the other, more important, half is WHY a transfer is denied. A student survey will not provide any accurate information about that.

Are transfers denied because of the accreditor? The reputation of the school from which the transfer is requested? The academic quality of the program? What factors go in to the decision?

While some institutions deny credit transfers based on accreditor, others deny it after a careful review of the courses.

This is another dishonest, simplistic view of the world from the Department, and OMB should squash this request.

Skeptic, at 9:50 am EDT on July 17, 2008

Emergency Data Request

It’s all about the Golden Rule: those who have the gold make the rules. Unfortunately our government has evolved from a beneficent sovereign to an ignorant manipulator, at least in the case of higher education. And it’s OUR money.

former cc pres, at 10:05 am EDT on July 17, 2008

College curriculum and transferring credits

This whole debate is a hoot! Colleges ought to have some degree of autonomy in accepting transfer credits. By the same token, there should be a much higher degree of conformity in curriculum from one university to the next than currently exists. No one can deny that some schools deny transfer credits on specious grounds. These spurrious denials do indeed have the effect of driving up the cost of education to students and taxpayers.

We can’t complain that the feds are not doing enough oversight, and then complain when the feds try to do their job.

feudi pandola, at 10:30 am EDT on July 17, 2008

HE needs to automate — the time is NOW!

It’s not just about the loss of credits a learner may lose transferring from one institution to another. That’s one of the issues. The other is the time it takes to receive your transcript from the sending institution, then manually go to the receiving institution and submit the paperwork to be assessed. Then wait 6-8 weeks to see if the credit is going to transfer. Sometimes it is delayed even longer if they request the student to go and find course descriptions from their previously attended institution. All the while student are delaying finishing their degree and moving into the workforce. This must be fixed! It’s such a manual process — when will this be seen as an important issue. I’m amazed this process is still a manual process. If institutions moved to a more pro-active automated approach whereby it was completely automated, I believe instead of 6-8 weeks to evaluate course credit it could be completed in less than a day. Institutions should invest the up front setup and maintain course history and equivalencies as they are assessed. I believe this process would save precious time for evaluators, faculty and advisors, and allow them to spend more time planning, working with and advising these students. Not just pushing them away saying you’ll have to wait to see what transfers before we schedule a meeting. Higher education institutions need to move toward an automated process — the time is NOW! What are they waiting for?

Andrew Parker, Student, at 10:30 am EDT on July 17, 2008

Novel Idea?

Wouldn’t be wonderful if they actually put educators in charge of the Dept. of Education instead of politicians and former business executives?

Ryan, Underpaid Employee at Underfunded State Institution in Illinois, at 10:35 am EDT on July 17, 2008

The Veteran’s Administration has addressed the transfer issue properly. They won’t pay GI Bill benefits twice for a course that is obviously similar to one they already took at another college. Huge amounts of Title IV money is wasted due to unfair transfer policies, and the Department is right to look for ways to improve getting the right dollars to the right students at the right time. Paying T4 for a course the student already earned credit for and can prove competency is not accomplishing this.

Jeff A, at 11:20 am EDT on July 17, 2008

transfer credits

I think the DOE is doing the right thing to aggresivly explore this major problem that has a very negative impact on students. The arrogance of research institutions costs undergrad students much wasted time and money. Our institution has some faculty teaching the same course here as at state colleges and yet the credits from these courses does not transfer. Having completed coursework from a nationally accredited college should not be the sole reason to deny transfer of credit. Twenty years ago I would have agreed, however, times have changed.

andy hoeveler, campus director at minnesota school of business, at 12:50 pm EDT on July 17, 2008

Big Education charges a fortune to its customers, the government pays the bills (mostly) via college financing and grants, and now the Big Education types are upset- the government now wants to protect, on some level, the customers of Big Education. They want the product ("college credits") that are sold by Big Education properly labelled (as to their transferrability). What an outrage!!

Another demonstration of moral superiority from our moral leaders in the academy...

mike, at 12:50 pm EDT on July 17, 2008

Transfer fee

JB and EM make good points. Evaluating transfer courses is difficult and hence costly. So, universities take short cuts: denying credits from certain types of institutions or relying on shoddy articulation agreements. If something cost money then charge for it. Transfer students should pay a fee for having their credits checked. Then we could hire extra staff to do this. When students are deciding whether to go to a CC or straight to a 4-year college they should factor in this charge.

The problem with a top down solution is that it will prevent colleges from trying new approaches in their courses. You could not change the focus of ABC 101 unless all colleges make the same change. Colleges need to be able to experiement. Isn’t our slowness to change another gripe people have about higher education?

Math Prof, at 2:15 pm EDT on July 17, 2008

First of all, I find it very amusing that this is suddenly an emergency, considering that transfer of credit problems have been around for quite some time now. It’s nice to see the government is finally getting its head wrapped around this concept.

What I have found the most frustrating about this process is the lack of communication between so-called “career schools” and more traditional higher-ed institutions; or more importantly the lack of communication between the accreditnig bodies for these seemingly disparate forms of education.

The accrediting rules that govern these groups are not all that different. But instead of doing any kind of real comparison of course content, traditional schools appear to be content to just blanketly say, “No” when it comes to trasferring credits.

With such a low-level of customer service to compete with, it’s no wonder that non-traditional schools are seeing such explosive growth, and traditional schools are experiencing record student retention problems. American students are demanding high levels of customer service in everything they do, and receiving an education, it seems, is no different.

EE, at 2:15 pm EDT on July 17, 2008

Transfer Credit

The students who most have problems transferring credit are those who forget their college portal user id and password in the 15 minutes between meeting with an advisor and the online orientation session.

These folks also forget that the technical courses and remedial courses won’t transfer; their advisors informed them of that fact yesterday, but that was twenty hours ago.

The students also hear, that course xyz istaught at cc in two semesters or three quarters, and big state u. will not accept xyz.1 and xyz.2 in place of a single semester course.

All more arguments for post-high school achievement tests such as ACT & SAT, and a standard GRE exam after college. What may be needed now, is a national post-junior college exam to settle many of these questions about student readi-ness for junior and senior level university courses.

Dr. F. Gump, at 3:25 pm EDT on July 17, 2008

It is so frustrating to hear from the elitists, who, lets face it, have never had to confront this issue in any real way and likely have not been personally effected by the discriminatory transfer policies and practices of “traditional” higher education institutions. This would not be an issue if current practice was fair — it is not and anecdotally most folks know it. The federal government is stepping in to determine if greater parity is required – when they find out just how uneven the playing field is, hopefully they will tie Title IV eligibility to fair practice.

MSM, at 3:50 pm EDT on July 17, 2008

Emergency??

With all of the current goofy stuff going on in higher ed....who was the knucklehead that thought this qualified as an “emergency"? Let me start of list of things that could possibly rank a bit higher on the emergency list than this issue.

Teach Grant (Groan) A fabulous attempt by our elected officials, who are truly concerned about student loan debt, to bring back the good old bait and switch tactic. Let’s see...hmmm the average undergrad at our institution has a 20,000 avg. debt loan when the leave...and oh yeah, let’s now add on up to an additional $16,000..... So 36k to repay...that is approximately $450 per month...for 10 years...

If Congress is concerned about the current state of affairs regarding higher ed...let’s just see what happens in 8-10 years...when the 80% of these grants revert back to unsub loans....

The Teach Grant is our current Emergency...not the price of books or transfer credit hours....

Shaking my head, at 9:30 am EDT on July 18, 2008

Who are we helping?

Ultimately, the mission of higher education is to SERVE the public. The lack of consistent transferability of credits between institutions only increases the barriers to education for those that need it the most. Do I want student to transfer from my school to another? — No. But ultimately, if that student completes their education, we all benefit. If by transferring to another school the student has to spend more time and money, the odds of them finishing their studies decrease significantly. Who do we benefit then? All we are doing is leaving the people we are supposed to be helping with no degree, no way to improve their situation, and the inability to pay back their loans which are needed to help others pay for school. There’s a reason why the government is the largest provider of student loans. They understand that the highest quality of life for every American is a right for all, not just for those who can afford it. If a college chooses not to accept our credits, I want to know why and I want to receive an educated rationale based on fact. We are all accredited institutions, we have regulations to follow and people to answer to. If quality is truly the issue then we should evaluate the course content rather than making superficial assumptions based on where the course was taken. Transparency is essential and I for one am proud that the government is stepping in and saving taxpayer money instead of wasting it repaying for classes that students have already successfully completed.

Susan Bailey, Dean of Faculty at Globe University, at 9:55 am EDT on July 18, 2008

Motives

It’s disingenuous for a representative of a for-profit “college” to pretend that his/her highest concern is the welfare of the poor student trying to transfer. Obviously, these schools would make a lot more money (and regionally acredited insitutions a lot less), if students weren’t scared away from them because of the chance their credits may not transfer. It’s also disengenous for representatives of such colleges to imply that any acreditation recognized by the DoE is equally rigorous in academic standards.

It’s a gross misprepresentation, moreover, to label students as customers, unless perhaps they are students at for-profit institutions. And if one may go so far as to say that employees of public institutions are public servants, it is not going too far to add that the students, whose educational costs are subsidized by the taxpayer, are as well. Conversely, if the student is a member of the public being served, so is the employee.

That said, I have been assisting transfer students all summer with registering for classes. In most cases, most of their credits transfer, but many cannot be applied to the degree sought. This is because the major may have changed or the requirements of the old program are not the same as those at the new institution.

One student became very frustrated and told me he thought it was foolish that my 4-year college did not ensure seamless matriculation from the nearest 2-year college. I informed him that our faculty, when designing our major, was tasked with building the best possible program (in terms of academic rigor and career preparation), and not with continuing someone else’s program. When the student accused my institution of just trying to squeeze extra money out of him, I explained that we receive far more in state and private funds than in tuition. The state and private interests expect a certain graduation rate, so it is in our better interest to facilitate, rather than postpone graduation. Thus, we do not oppose transfer of credits for frivolous reasons.

Dr. K, at 1:05 pm EDT on July 18, 2008

Long time coming

I fought this battle with the South Carolina Technical College system for decades. Finally, SC Commission on Higher Education put together a panel of college professors and those of us who worked with transfer credit and fixed the problem. Now courses transfer between mega universities like USC and minor technical college like Denmark Tech with relative ease.

How long are we going to allow the elitist attitudes of higher education to dictate what content from which college or university is “better.” Students taking courses at Technical Colleges in SC do as well, if not better, than that same demographic cohort at the senior university level.

I studied this for years, the average GPA of a transfer from the Technical College system in SC was nearly six-tenths of a point higher than our generic students. The whole issue for SC was to eliminate all of the roadblocks for students who chose to go the Technical College route, and it has apparently worked.

Martin, at 1:15 pm EDT on July 18, 2008

Give me a break!

As a simple advisement coordinator from an academic institution, I resent it when nationally accredited (if even that) administrators think that we should accept their academic credits.

Although I have a graduate degree and more, I still like to look at some things in a clear and simple manner.

There is a simple purpose for regional accreditation — to assure that educational institutions meet minimum standards for faculty, libraries, research, etc. so that students can be assured that they are receiving a certain level of education.

In my 20+ years of advising, I have had to make the discouraging comment that the institution that a student formerly attended is not regionally accredited and thus the credits are non-transferrable. Many times it is from the same institution in our area which has changed their name at least four times since I began advising, and STILL has not managed to become regionally accredited. Some of the students, fortunately, understand and would comment that they thought there was something ‘wrong’ about some of the comments they received from their advisor at the other school, and thus were checking on their transferability status with us. My question has always been, Why haven’t they sought regional accreditation because they know we are not going to accept their credits and they have had legal issues raised against them many times!

I would be interested to see what institutions some of the people from D.O.E. and those requesting this information graduated from, and if they have any academic integrity or intelligence at all. It wouldn’t surprise me if they went to a diploma mill if they actually have degrees, and don’t understand the difference between a real academic environment and one that will just give them a piece of paper that says ‘diploma’.

Debbie, Advisement Coordinator at University of Central Florida, at 6:20 pm EDT on July 21, 2008

Emergency Request

We need reliable information about transfer students and their credit. Why not take the time to properly design a research instrument? The results would be held in a much higher esteem. One approach to the issue may be to better educate prospective students on the different types of degrees, diplomas, majors, and institutions, and what to expect from each. Institutions design their courses around the institutional mission, goals, and objectives as well as the specific degrees they offer. While we should recognize significant overlap, we should not expect all courses to be the same.

Jo, Academic Transfer Coordinator, at 4:20 pm EDT on July 22, 2008

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