The Power Dynamics of Transfer

Transfer is riddled with obstacles for students.

Only about a third of community college students successfully transfer to four-year institutions, and only 16 percent earn a bachelor’s degree within six years, according to a 2024 report from the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College.

While it’s easy to place the blame on community colleges, a new book argues that problems with the transfer process are much more complex. Discredited: Power, Privilege, and Community College Transfer (Harvard Education Press) analyzes how community college and university staff involved in the transfer process interact as well as how their power dynamics and communication with students and each other affect these systems.

Over six years, starting in 2015, the authors tracked 140 community college students who intended to transfer in two community college districts in Texas and staff from 11 of the most common transfer destinations for these students. This included 15 community college employees and 19 from universities.

Right now, the status quo really disadvantages students who are trying to transfer.”

—Huriya Jabbar, associate professor of education policy at the University of Southern California

Inside Higher Ed discussed the book’s findings with authors Lauren Schudde, associate professor of educational leadership and policy at the University of Texas at Austin, and Huriya Jabbar, associate professor of education policy at the University of Southern California.

The conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows below.

Q: Your book looks at transfer through the lens of how different personnel in the transfer process interact. Why did you decide to take that approach to the issue?

Schudde: It wasn’t necessarily what we set out to do. Really, this emerged from two parallel studies, one that was focused on students and one that was focused on transfer personnel. [We realized] as we were seeing the challenges that students were navigating how the decisions and some of the dynamics that we witnessed among the transfer personnel were really explaining why there were so many challenges for students.

Q: You make the point in the book that community colleges often get the flak for issues with transfer. Why do you think they take so much of the blame?

Jabbar: Community colleges are really complex institutions. And there have been a lot of hurdles, barriers, bureaucratic processes that can make it challenging for students to navigate [transfer] … There’s a shortage of resources in community colleges, and so there aren’t always enough or sufficient advisers for students. So, I think there are real challenges in community colleges that a lot of policies have recently tried to address. But our argument is that if we just look at the community college, we miss many important players that are also really shaping how transfer plays out.

Q: You mentioned that there are important players that are sometimes overlooked. Who are some of those players that we don’t necessarily talk about who have a real impact on how students experience transfer?

Schudde: The big [ones] that we emphasize are the more selective public institutions … and that’s because they kind of set up the rules for how credits can move. If you think of a prospective transfer student, a lot of them are defining a reach school, and that reach school is likely to be that public flagship. And so [students are] really trying to set their own criteria of what they need to do by looking at what they would need for that degree program, which means the other universities may need to also look to that flagship institution to understand, what are people doing, what are they trying to prepare for and how do we align with that?

Q: Your book suggests that there are power differentials between different kinds of people involved in the transfer process. Who did you find had the most power at their disposal and who had the least?

Schudde: We talked about some of the actors who have power, like universities. But you know, the people who have the least power are really students who are navigating these really complex systems. And they’re the ones who suffer from the lack of coordination and clear transfer pathways. We had students with different access to resources. Even those who had … these really complex spreadsheets to track all of their requirements … didn’t transfer or lost credits when they transferred. And so, even when students were doing things to try to get some power in this system that really disadvantages them, that didn’t always lead to success.

Jabbar: In terms of who has the most power, it would be university administrators … but it also includes faculty, which is not really something that you hear about a lot as part of the transfer process.

A lot of university faculty wouldn’t think of themselves as being part of the transfer process, but their preferences for how coursework can come from an outside institution into their program and apply toward their degree program ends up ultimately shaping transfer policy and how it’s implemented at the institution.

And … it’s not like [faculty are] necessarily actively thinking, “I’m anti-transfer.” It’s much more about their own incentives and their own focus on prestige or their perceived rigor of a program. They just have different priorities, but ultimately those priorities end up having this downstream influence.

Q: What did you find to be the biggest barriers for students in the transfer process?

Schudde: There are many, and they come at different phases. So, the first is just trying to understand how credits will move across different institutions and into different programs, and even just how to gather the accurate information to understand those processes … And what we argue is that the expectations of the field is that [students] are gathering that information and they are troubleshooting and fact-checking, which means they’re also going to interact with a bunch of different actors to try to ask questions … but that’s a lot of intense digging and information-seeking that is expected of students.

Jabbar: Typically, you would think students should be able to go to their adviser at the community college to help kind of navigate this. But when we talk to advisers, they too were struggling with staying up-to-date on what are the requirements. We did see some examples of efforts to try to improve information flow in particular areas of the state. But it’s a lot to ask of students. It’s also a lot to ask of community college staff and advisers.

Schudde: That’s early barriers … But let’s say they’ve been successful, they have transferred and they’ve gotten into their university. The next set of barriers might be finding out that things did not actually transfer as you expected them to … Or, trying to figure out how do I get through the university requirements toward the degree that I want in the least amount of time possible, where it doesn’t feel like I wasted my time and my money on trying to complete some of those similar courses at my prior institution.

Q: Having taken a deep look at this process, what do you think are some of the most promising reform possibilities for transfer?

Schudde: What I would like to see are associate degrees that transfer, meaning they count for junior status … Instead of allowing all this variation in what will count where, it means if a student gets their two-year degree, they know that they have the equivalent of two years of credits at the public university.

Jabbar: That’s the main recommendation that we have in the book. And I’ll just point out that our recommendations do require some kind of legislative action that would take away some institutional autonomy but create a more streamlined system. Right now, the status quo really disadvantages students who are trying to transfer.