Transferring between colleges and universities impacts millions of college students throughout the United States each year. The transfer population is a large, fragmented market of prospective students. This post will explore the key challenges faced by both the transfer student and the institutions endeavoring to serve them. This post will also how current technology solutions, and the higher education industry itself, present obstacles in the transfer process. A follow-on post will present some potential solutions and methods we have worked on with our client partners.
As context and background, AcademyOne launched www.collegetransfer.net, the first national college transfer portal in 2008. The national portal focused on two goals: to address the needs of prospective transfer students navigating college transfer and to support institutions seeking to promote their transfer guidance to the growing prospective population. Over 1,000 institutions have connected with collegetransfer.net supporting their transfer profile and publishing course equivalency guidance.
AcademyOne also introduced AdvancED, our credit management system for receiving institutions that includes automating the prior learning petition process and pathway checklists. We have introduced AdvisED, our transfer guidance tool for 2yr sending institutions reinforcing completion before transfer. We have introduced AssessED for automating prior learning assessment steps.
AcademyOne has worked with thousands of institutions, collected millions of course equivalencies and published transfer data to assist millions of prospective transfer students navigate through what still remains a transfer labyrinth. We are now using machine learning and artificial intelligence to support the transfer practices. Data is gold. It helps reflect past decisions and project the best possible path given what is known, familiar and factual.
Challenge #1. Will my Credits Transfer and Count? Transfer is a unique challenge for colleges and universities who have antiquated data – and disconnected data systems. Antiquated data is a byproduct of change over time. If a course changes, all the equivalencies linked should be reviewed. Many institutions defer review until a student hails from that institution. Faculty can change, highlighting how they may consider comparability. Most institutions hold on to disconnected data systems for 20-30 years. It takes clean data to present automated modeling tools. Institutions generally promote programs of study (aka majors) and courses offered by their schools such as Business, Phycology, Engineering, Etc.. Course equivalencies are not linked to degree requirements – and thus could transfer as credit, but not satisfy the degree requirements. Institutions carve out a list of requirements to be complete in a framed timetable assuming the requirements are satisfied by coursework and experiences they offer.
Challenge #2. I am Mobile. Back in 2005, when writing the AcademyOne business plan, we coined the phrase “Alma mater” is being replaced with “I am mobile.” As we predicted, student transfer has mushroomed. Today, over 60% of students completing their degree requirements have attended at least two institutions. It is estimated, $5 Billion in Tuition and Fees are lost on courses that don’t satisfy degree requirements, further taxing students to take an extra semester of coursework to complete degree requirements. Students taking an extra semester strains financial aid, burdens student loan default reinforced by how credit is recognized or not.
Challenge #3. Going Off the Beaten Path. A growing population of students stop out, drop out or delay completing courses when they face factors like how to afford college, the need to work, family responsibilities and changing support. The varied problems also include disillusionment, frustration and distractions. They go off the path concluding college may not be for them.
Challenge #4. My Static Transfer Guide. Sending and receiving institutions negotiate and agree on program-to-program transfer requirements. This usually takes some time and leverages a course-by-course suggestive mapping. Once prepared and signed, the Senders and Receiver usually prepare their own version of the guide. Over time, these standalone guides loose precision or fail to keep up to date with course changes, thus giving potential transfer students further trouble downstream.
Challenge #5. Very Confused. Don’t assume transfer students understand the process, sequence or steps. They generally don’t. Much of the online web content is filled with acronyms and vocabulary that may differ between senders and receivers. Many transfer students have not settled on a major, or have performed poorly focused on a major and desire to change course. Exploring what it means to change major is all wrapped up in the transfer process.
Challenge #1. The Beaten Path. “Receiver” Institutions promote their most prevalent transfer history with “Senders” who they have had a history with. Enabling students to search and view the prior beaten paths is generally supported with course-to-course equivalencies and transfer articulation guides. Not all programs of study are covered by transfer articulation guides. Nor, not all courses, especially the lower division courses can satisfy all degree requirements. A math course may satisfy a business major, but not one for architecture or engineering.
Challenge #2. Analysis Paralysis. Because of time demands, costs and the state of prospective student exploration, students may not be committed to enroll at the time they visit online or in person. So many institutions delay prospective degree audit checks until after the prospective student enrolls and is entered fully into the student information system with their academic transcripts. Transfer assessment delay introduces transfer shock – which impacts the study plan, complicates advising and leaves the student juggling issues if they do enroll and then have to address how their prior learning recognized impacts their scheduling, billing and completion requirements.
Challenge #3. Institutional Capabilities. The steppingstones (capabilities) get harder as the diversity of transfer types increase. Efficiency is gained with scale. But, as the net widens to attract more transfers coming from more distant “senders”, scale and speed are weakened as transfer assessment process must proceed. As more transfer student experiences emerge, a broader response is warranted and more expensive. Institutions with few transfers respond to transfer requests relying less on the history or pattern of other transfers. As the volume increases, more emphasis is placed on reusing transfer data.
Challenge #4. Beyond Admissions. Admissions is generally designed to recruit, match and enroll prospective learners who are projected to have the capacity and interest to finish the academic program. Transfer has different steps than the traditional admissions application.
Challenge #5. Diversity. Transfer students are not all the same. They have affinities drawn by their past efforts with an eye toward their aspiration. An adult returning to college to finish a degree from a decade ago has different circumstances and needs than a younger student who decides to transfer between a private university and a public university closer to home. Here are some other examples:
Challenge #6. Governance and working together across an institution to overcome the barriers of transfer is not easy. Each institution has their own perspective of their quality and rigor, divided by schools and spread across a diverse faculty. We should not represent transfer as a singular path. There are dependencies and requirements that need to be distinguished.
Challenge #7. One size does not fit all. Transfer student services depend on the type of transfer student and where they are transferring from. Prior learning experiences are not just classroom based. Work experiences, like someone who has twenty years’ experience in their field never earning a degree could be served with Prior Learning Assessment (PLA) which is not repeatable for others.
Challenge #8. Transfer is not a one-way process. Senders need to know what transfers and what does not and why. Receivers need to know what learning outcomes and inputs are used by senders with their students. With standalone infrastructures, institutional knowledge is limited and often out of step.
Challenge #1. Disparate Technology. Technology throughout the education ecosystem is very decentralized. Many of the subsystems are disconnected, the rely on coping datasets from one system to another, force procedures to enroll students because they are not designed to serve prospective students or have unique ways of linking data.
Challenge #2. Students usually have to wait for transcripts to be requested and sent to the institution, and then converted to digital form, so that the data can be used to determine transferability. They can’t access their academic history directly without a secure login, which could have been removed given how long it has been since they were enrolled.
Challenge #3. Information Overload. There is a great deal of data to be managed in the transfer process from source programs and courses to how the courses are graded. Linkages between the sending institution and the receiver are generally offline. Which means, much of the data can be sent and received on paper, but then re-keyed. For example, having the current course offerings, syllabi and faculty directory accessible allows the receiver to validate level of comparability.
Challenge #4. Authoritative Course and Program Documents are kept offline by faculty and departments. They revise the documents overtime. Version control and document retention is problematic often lacking unified institutional practices across colleges and departments.
Challenge #5. Trust is a topical issue reinforced by familiarity, location, reputation and activity. Trust between disconnected systems requires duplication of effort, introduces re-coding or errors in transposing source information.
Challenge #1. Accreditation can lead students to infer the rigor of one institution is the same as another or that they would be the same. Yet, institutions are not created equal. Faculty and resources are weighed by peer review to see how they follow the pack or stand out. Comparability and applicability still need to be validated to see if the subjects, courses and learning experiences satisfy degree requirements.
Challenge #2. Brand, reputation, rankings help differentiate and reinforce how institutions perceive the value of coursework offered and completed by students. Third parties assess some of the details and emphasis what they feel is important measures, such as the volume of publications, research and consulting sought by colleges, departments and faculty. These measures may be important, but don’t actually relate to the on-the-ground benefits students may achieve from their learning experiences.
Challenge #3. Comparability is difficult to assess across thousands of institutions and millions of course titles. Course time, effort, assessments, difficulty and learning outcomes are not captured in course offering descriptions. The devil is always in the details. Unless a learner has captured and saved the course documents including syllabi, assertions have to be validated and approved by academics slowing down the assessment process.
Developing and sustaining transfer guidance systems is very dependent upon access to data curated and shared by each institution. AcademyOne has a long history of successful projects consolidating and centralizing the data services needed. We work directly with the institutions to improve their data support services, iron out difficulties and improve the confidence in how each prospective student is addressed with proactive and reactive services.
The capabilities and capacities for institutions to curate their decision support systems differ widely. Technology can be a game changer. It offers methods to support improved user experiences, greater collaboration by removing some of the barriers and costs isolated data systems reinforce and offer streamlined workflows referencing the historical decisions.
Retaining the linkages to the past, present and future is an important step. The ever-growing demands to support how learning experiences address college or university degree requirements can’t be understated. The commitment and resources allocated to support transfer guidance systems vary by institution – as well as the level of due diligence assessing student learning assertions following agreed rubrics recognizing and employing best practices, quality control and academic oversight.