Three Perspectives on Transfer

In a March 2024 Inside Higher Ed essay, we highlighted—lamented really—the outcomes of a study conducted by the Community College Research Center (CCRC), the Aspen Institute, and the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center (NSCRC), which concluded that only 16 percent of community college students transferred to a four-year institution and earned a bachelor’s degree within six years. This statistic was lower for minoritized groups. Worse still, the 16 percent figure was largely unchanged from an earlier study conducted on a cohort of students who began college in 2007. We concluded that the transfer pathway between two- and four-year institutions did not serve as a productive pipeline to the bachelor’s degree, especially for underrepresented students, and that our collective efforts to improve the pathway had largely failed.

Our disappointment was less about the 16 percent figure and more about the lost promise of the transfer function. Few avenues in American life allow individuals to ascend into elite, flagship, liberal arts or other four-year colleges and universities regardless of previous academic preparation, income level, or racial, ethnic or religious background. In today’s highly stratified postsecondary educational system, if we fail to improve the productivity of this educational onramp, we will abandon one of postsecondary education’s longest-running and progressive ideals.

Our essay spurred some disagreement from higher education colleagues—and understandably so. Over the past two decades, transfer has captured the interest of the philanthropic community, led to the formation of advocacy and research organizations, and spurred significant state and local policymaking. Calling out transfer’s failures was bound to generate a reaction. Arguments fell into three camps.

Declare Victory and Go Home

This group argues that the low transfer rate is a reasonable outcome given the institutions that actively participate in transfer, such as community colleges, and the students those institutions are most likely to serve. Their logic is persuasive: Community colleges are open-access institutions; anyone can enroll regardless of their previous educational success. As a result, these institutions welcome and serve many students who lack college-going skills. This situation is compounded by the fact that community colleges are often the least well-funded sector of U.S. higher education. As such, they have comparatively modest academic and advising supports to help students meet their transfer goals.

Even more problematic, this group also noted that the current transfer system is inherently complex, reducing the number of students who manage to navigate its considerable rapids. In a highly diffuse postsecondary system, where virtually every college or university operates autonomously, transfers get caught in the maw between sending and receiving institutions. There is no guarantee that a student will be admitted to his or her dream transfer destination. Even if they are, students are often unable to port all their community college credit to the four-year institution.

Our colleagues also stressed that the bachelor’s degree has lost a bit of its luster, especially among younger students drawn by the lure of earning family-sustaining wages directly out of high school rather than the prospect of paying off student loans. Price-sensitive students are frequently drawn to community colleges, and once enrolled, they may decide not to continue onto a four-year institution. Community colleges are in the enviable position of offering a variety of educational credentials that may look more appealing than transferring. In addition to associate degrees, these institutions offer, as a crucial part of their mission, short- and medium-term credentials and licensures that often lead to specific jobs in the local economy.

It might be easy for some to classify the 16 percent figure as the best we will ever achieve. College costs, unmet basic needs, student loan debt and concerns about post-graduation employment play into the worries that both students and their families have about whether going to college is a risk worth taking. Given the fraught and complex transfer pathway, our colleagues believe that we may as well celebrate the 16 percent figure as condemn it.

Wait and See—The Best Is Yet to Come

The ”wait and see” crowd believe that transformative and hard-won higher education reforms are only now beginning to impact students. More time is needed to see how they will influence the transfer rate. They specifically highlight two initiatives.

The first is the widespread reform of developmental (remedial) education, especially at community colleges. These reforms eliminate stand-alone remedial courses, in favor of credit-bearing courses supplemented with tutoring and advising services to help students pass. Earlier institutional practices, which often placed students in remedial courses based on a single high school grade or placement test score, diverted as many as 70 percent of community college students into developmental education courses for which students receive no credit while burning through their limited student aid. Worse, they could not enroll in college courses until they earned their way out of their remedial course placements. Students in this situation—higher education’s version of purgatory—might be stranded there for a year or more if they do not simply leave the institution in despair.

This group’s second hoped-for transformation is the implementation of “guided pathways.” This approach channels students’ academic interests—which for many are initially inchoate or diffuse—into a limited number of “meta-majors” from which they can further refine their interests in later academic terms. With fewer, yet broader, disciplinary choices, students have a better chance, the theory goes, of enrolling in courses that build toward a specific major. Guided pathways are constructed to be especially helpful to first-generation students or others who lack sufficient college knowledge when they enter higher education. Previously, many such students struggled to make wise course selections, lengthening their time to degree and drawing down their available financial aid.

The reform of developmental education and implementation of guided pathways are both positive movements in higher education and are relatively recent. These reforms, widely supported by both policymakers and academics, nonetheless will take time to blanket the country. Early adopters have taken as many as five years to implement guided pathways on their campuses. Waiting for these initiatives to hit a scaling “tipping point” does little for transfer students in the interim.

Start Over

The third set of responses come from colleagues who believe that the 16 percent rate confirms the false premise of transfer from its inception. For this group, transfer is a promise that can never be fulfilled. With about 40 percent of all undergraduates enrolled in community colleges and an estimated eight of ten first-time community college students hoping to earn a bachelor’s degree, the enormity of the potential transfer cohort exceeds the admissions capacity of four-year institutions.

This harsh winnowing process is nothing new; it has been at the heart of the transfer pathway since its beginning more than a century ago. Transfer’s legacy is more about thwarting access than supporting it. The 16 percent figure is the latest empirical verification of sociologist Burton Clark’s often-quoted conclusion from 1960 that the community college transfer pathway serves to “cool out” the overheated aspirations of many community college students. If there is a success to be found, it is that the cooling out function is working better than ever.

Colleagues in this camp argue the traditional transfer pathway between two- and four-year institutions needs more than a refresh. They call for the abandonment of the current transfer pathway in favor of other models that have a better bachelor’s degree completion rate than 16 percent.

Where Does All This Leave Us?

You need not agree with all or any of the arguments from our colleagues and still believe that we can do better than 16 percent. With little evidence of an increasing transfer rate over the past decade—despite significant policymaking, investments and programmatic initiatives in the interim—reasonable people must surely pause to reassess our contemporary transfer pathway.

The key question for us is this: Can we mend transfer, or do we need to start with something new? As we have reviewed the CCRC/Aspen/NSCRC data, as well as reflected on the thoughtful commentaries of our colleagues (and of those who work daily in the transfer trenches), we offer the following:

1. We know and should support those institutions where transfer is working—that is, where significantly higher transfer rates are being documented regularly. Sometimes those outcomes are aided by proximity: Northern Virginia Community College, for example, is just ten minutes from George Mason University. Our nation should further incentivize additional substantive partnerships among neighboring institutions.
2. We should support different forms of credentialing and degree-granting. Today, 24 states allow community colleges to offer baccalaureate degrees. Many four-year institutions hate this idea on its face, but they should not uniformly oppose it given the degree of access it offers to students.
3. We need to shift higher education’s incentive structure. Enrollment is a key element, but persistence, completion and student economic mobility must play a role in institutional funding models. Fiscal sustainability must be directly tied to the student outcomes that we’re seeking.
4. We must solve the credit muddle and make a national commitment to academic credit mobility. This is not a plea for all colleges to accept each other’s courses for degree credit; this isn’t a realistic expectation from an academic or curricular standpoint. What we need is to mandate greater transparency for community college students by clearly showing how credit will transfer from one institution to another prior to their enrollment in four-year institutions. Students will vote with their feet and enroll at those institutions that accept more of their previous academic work toward their degree.

Rather than lament the fact that the transfer pathway has never lived up to its hoped-for potential, we support its rejuvenation in a more strategic fashion. We should strengthen the transfer pathway where it serves students well—by “well,” we mean a partnership between institutions that encompasses the tenets of a transfer-affirming culture and focuses on the needs of 21st century students— through strong advising, sane credit mobility policies, transfer-focused orientations and summer bridge programs, among other things. As noted above, this ideal situation is most likely to happen between two- and four-year institutions that are close to one another. However, where transfer may not serve students, such as in so-called “education deserts,” where, say, a community college is the only postsecondary resource available, why not let that institution offer four-year degrees? The reverse would apply to four-year institutions serving as a similarly singular education resource by allowing them to offer sub-baccalaureate degrees and other credentials.

The idea here is not to abandon transfer, wait for innovative solutions to bear fruit or believe that a 16 percent completion rate represents success. The problems that weaken transfer—lack of credit mobility, low completion rates, unmet student basic needs—afflict higher education generally. If we solve those challenges, we’ll solve transfer. In the meantime, rather than focus on special pleading for transfer students, we should advance broader strategies that better serve all students as they pursue their baccalaureate degree dream.