How Are Faculty, Staff and Students Really Using CUNY Transfer Explorer?

As students become increasingly mobile, carrying credits from multiple institutions and sources, the need for transparency in credit transfer has become paramount. At the City University of New York, CUNY Transfer Explorer (T-Rex) was launched in May 2020 to address this need with a goal of increasing the transparency and accuracy of transfer information. There are similar tools with similar goals nationwide, but to what extent are these tools meeting their goals, and how are stakeholders actually using these tools in practice? Our research team undertook a mixed-methods research project to explore these questions for CUNY T-Rex. In this blog post, we share some key insights from what we learned and offer suggestions for conducting similar research at your own system or institution.

To provide some background, fewer than half of community college students nationally who transfer to a four-year institution graduate with a bachelor’s degree within six years. Students who do transfer frequently lose credits in the process; the U.S. Government Accountability Office estimates an average of 43 percent of credits are lost. These challenges come with high stakes due to the large volume of transfer; the most recent data we examined found that in the 2022–23 academic year, approximately 1.6 million credits were transferred into CUNY colleges, with the majority being CUNY-to-CUNY course credit transfers, 29 percent being course credits transferred from outside the CUNY system and 8 percent credits from other sources of validated learning.

CUNY T-Rex is free to use, accessible to the public without a log-in and updated daily. By extracting data on a daily basis from CUNY’s student information systems, DegreeWorks and CUNYfirst, CUNY T-Rex provides users with the most up-to-date and accurate information on course equivalencies and program requirements, thus allowing students to make more informed choices about transfer. Since its inception, CUNY T-Rex has grown in both popularity and functionality, with approximately 200,000 unique users to date. This rapid growth highlights the importance of understanding how stakeholders are using credit mobility tools such as CUNY T-Rex and the extent to which tools meant to ease the transfer process are meeting their goals.

What We Heard From Stakeholders

Though CUNY T-Rex offers various features to provide transparency around credit transfer, the students we spoke to highlighted the tool’s original core functionalities as its most helpful. These features, CUNY to CUNY by Course and CUNY to CUNY by Subject, allow users to view how individual courses or sets of courses transfer between CUNY colleges. Specifically, students praised these features for their ability to identify courses from other CUNY colleges that could fulfill specific requirements for their current program. This was especially helpful when a course they needed for their degree wasn’t offered in a particular term—CUNY T-Rex allowed them to easily find equivalent courses (often offered virtually, so they didn’t even need to travel to another campus) that could meet the same requirement without having to wait until a subsequent term and potentially delay degree completion.

Used less frequently, CUNY to CUNY by Transcript has enabled students to log in and view how their current or completed courses would transfer to different colleges or majors, based on their transcript (rather than having to put each course in individually, which can be done without a log-in). Some students found this feature useful when assessing credit transfer for past or current coursework, influencing their destination college choices based on transferability. However, some students expressed hesitation in trusting a single authoritative source about how their credits would transfer to a destination institution, especially when they found conflicting information from articulation agreements or other online resources. In some cases, staff or faculty advisers were able to help students navigate seemingly conflicting information, highlighting the importance of adviser guidance.

Students are not the only intended end users of CUNY T-Rex; CUNY faculty, staff and administrators have also frequently cited it as a valuable asset in their daily work. Many pre-transfer advisers noted using CUNY T-Rex in their advising practices to help students understand the equivalencies they would receive, enabling these advisers to have more direct conversations with students with increased transparency.

One unique feature of CUNY T-Rex is the Transfer Equivalency Review function, a workflow for faculty and staff with authenticated access to suggest, approve and validate course equivalencies. Analytics data showed wide variation in the extent of use of this feature across CUNY colleges, with a handful of colleges using the feature extensively and others barely touching it. At colleges where the feature was widely used, stakeholders reported very positive experiences: They described how it encouraged increased collaboration between institutional departments, and even across colleges, and how it improved efficiency in identifying and correcting incorrect equivalencies. Even at colleges where the Transfer Equivalency Review feature was not being used as extensively, administrators and faculty reported using CUNY T-Rex as an invaluable reference in creating or updating articulation agreements, leading to more productive conversations with colleagues at partner colleges by providing a common starting point.

Despite its growing popularity and usefulness, CUNY T-Rex has limitations. In particular, the information it presents reflects the data in CUNY’s underlying data systems, and it is thus dependent on the timely maintenance of course equivalencies and program requirements. For example, the accuracy of information presented to users can be impacted by the lag time between when a curriculum change is initially proposed versus when it becomes officially approved and updated in the underlying data systems that CUNY T-Rex draws from.

Conducting Research on Use of Credit Mobility Tools

Our research team at Ithaka S+R undertook this mixed-methods evaluation to understand the behaviors, uses and implementation of CUNY T-Rex at individual institutions and systemwide. The approaches we used could be adapted to your own institutional or system context. We drew on both qualitative and quantitative data sources, including administrative data, website analytics and in-depth interviews and focus groups with a variety of relevant stakeholders across CUNY community and bachelor’s colleges.

When conducting similar research at your institution or system, keep in mind these considerations:

• Target your methodology to your research questions. What burning questions do you have about how the tool is being used and how it could better support students, faculty and staff? Use these questions as both your starting point and your North Star when you think about how to collect and analyze relevant data.
• Are there existing analytics tools available that might provide measurable data on how many people are using your tool, the features they are accessing most often and the characteristics of those users? If so, these data can serve as a useful supplement to any direct feedback from stakeholders.
• How can you best hear directly from students about how the credit mobility tool is influencing their transfer decisions? Surveys and/or focus groups can provide valuable information about the ways students are—and aren’t—using the tool.
• Which additional stakeholders are using the tool? How and for what purposes? You may find that the tool is being used in unexpected but significant ways that merit targeted administrative support.
• What challenges are students, faculty and staff still facing around transfer? Could the tool be adapted or expanded to address those challenges, and if so, how?

Armed with these data, administrators can better determine how to train and encourage end users in the use of the credit mobility tool as well as offer improvements to the tool itself. In turn, these changes can ultimately help students make more informed transfer decisions and assist faculty and staff in providing better support.