Duncan Orders Study of Restrictive Transfer of Credit Rules

Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, has announced that he is ordering a study on "restrictive" policies on the transfer of academic credit from colleges to one another. In a letter to the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, one of the groups that requested such a study, he said that the analysis should be completed within a year. With more students attending multiple institutions to earn a bachelor's degree, transfer rules have become increasingly controversial, with many community colleges charging that they are needlessly detailed and some for-profit institutions saying their students are discriminated against.