Inside Higher Ed
Millions of students begin their education at a community college with plans to eventually earn a bachelor’s degree, but moving from one institution to another can mean navigating confusing requirements, losing credits and figuring out systems that don’t always work together.
So why is transfer still so difficult despite years of reform efforts, and what would it take to make the process truly seamless for students?
Josh Wyner, executive director of the College Excellence Program at the Aspen Institute, and John Fink, senior research associate and program lead at the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University, joined Inside Higher Ed student success reporter Joshua Bay on Voices of Student Success to unpack where transfer students encounter the biggest barriers and what institutions can do to create avenues that help more community college students earn a bachelor’s degree.
Here are five takeaways on the transfer process and what colleges can do to make it work more smoothly for students.
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- Transfer is still harder than it should be.
Fink noted that about a decade ago, roughly a third of community college students transferred to four-year institutions and fewer than one in five completed a bachelor’s degree within six years—and those numbers haven’t budged much since. He said that’s particularly concerning as conversations about college affordability and postsecondary access continue to take center stage.
“Students are on their own oftentimes to navigate this complex system instead of institutions working together to make it possible for students to navigate,” Fink said. “That continues to be a challenge 10 years later.”
Wyner noted that the challenges surrounding community college transfer stretch back even further. Community colleges enrolled only about a million students in the 1960s, a number that grew to five to six million over the following decades, he said. But four-year institutions didn’t necessarily adapt as the sector expanded.
“Most of those students were in premajor programs. They were there to get the first two years of a bachelor’s degree,” Wyner said.
“But when the Pell Grant program passed and we grew the number of community college students, four-year colleges weren’t incentivized or didn’t get the message that they had to change their practices,” he added. “Nor did, frankly, community colleges as they grew very quickly in terms of how they were going to measure their own success and what their mission was.”
Wyner said the baby boom and subsequent boom echo also created a large supply of students entering four-year institutions directly from high school, giving colleges little reason to prioritize transfer students. Financial incentives continue to work against transfer today, he added.
“It is more expensive to educate an upperclassman than it is a lowerclassman at a four-year university,” Wyner said. “So the idea that they’re going to suddenly want to take lots more students into the junior year, the financial incentives cut against that.”
- Successful transfer starts long before students transfer.
Fink said that while today’s students are savvy when it comes to sharing information among themselves, including through Reddit and other online forums, placing the burden on them to figure out complicated transfer processes is neither feasible nor equitable.
“It’s not scalable, and it disproportionately impacts students that do not have access to this type of college knowledge or these networks of people who have been through college,” Fink said.
He also noted that research on early momentum at community colleges shows that only about half of students who start at a community college return for their second year, underscoring the importance of helping transfer-intending students get on the right path from the beginning.
“Students who do gain early momentum in that first year—hitting credit milestones, passing key gateway courses—they are much more likely to complete. They’re much more likely to transfer and get a bachelor’s degree,” Fink said.
“You might think this is the responsibility of community colleges to strengthen that onboarding process, but for transfer-aspiring students who want a bachelor’s [degree] from a neighboring university, that university ideally would be a joint partner in owning that transfer onboarding,” he added.
Building those kinds of partnerships requires institutions to “start with the end in mind,” Wyner said. One notable example is the partnership between George Mason University and Northern Virginia Community College, where students can be dually admitted to both institutions early in their community college experience.
“They’ve decided what advising touch points they need—not just to figure out what courses to take in community college or maybe transfer, but all the way through to the bachelor’s degree,” Wyner said. “It’s those kinds of partnerships, those kinds of models, that every higher ed institution ought to be looking at.”
- Not all transferred credits move students closer to a degree.
Wyner said one obstacle to streamlining transfer is that a plurality of community college students are enrolled in general studies programs, which may allow them to earn an associate degree but don’t necessarily give them junior standing in a specific major at a four-year university.
“For far too long, community colleges have been agnostic as to when students make decisions and what degree they complete,” Wyner said. “One of the biggest challenges is allowing students to delay their career exploration, find a sense of purpose, choose a program and develop an individualized plan.”
“When you rob students of a sense of purpose, when you don’t feel a responsibility to help them figure out why they’re in college, it’s a lot easier for life to get in the way,” he added. “It’s a lot easier for them to wander through a curriculum without making appropriate decisions that align to what their ultimate goals are.”
Fink said another challenge is that decisions about which credits count toward a particular program aren’t made solely at the university level. Individual faculty and academic departments also wield significant power over program requirements.
“One of the great parts of American higher ed is the diversity of academic programming, but this also means that different programs have different requirements,” Fink said. “When those are individual decisions made by faculty around those program requirements, how students experience transfer is ‘Well, I know that I’m kind of interested in public health, but if I want to go to the flagship, they require calculus to get into public health, versus if I want to go to this other university, it’s maybe more of a statistics track.’”
“Students experience this as, like, ‘Well, OK, where should I be planning for? Where am I going to get into? I might have different requirements based on the destination,’” he added.
- Successful transfer requires colleges to work together.
Wyner said one of the most transformational changes in the transfer ecosystem would be for four-year university presidents to not only recognize transfer as an institutional priority, but also actively partner with neighboring community colleges.
“Forty percent of all undergrads in this country are in community colleges,” Wyner said. “So as a four-year college president, if you understand that the majority of that 40 percent are aiming for a bachelor’s degree, you have to understand that part of your institutional mission is to make sure that the community college students in your service area—whether you’re a national, a state flagship or a regional institution—part of your mission has to be to help more community college students get bachelor’s degrees.”
Fink agreed on the need for university leaders to champion stronger partnerships across institutions. But he added that colleges also need to recognize how the transfer population itself is changing, particularly as more high school students earn community college credits through dual enrollment.
“The good thing is that we find that students with prior dual enrollment actually have pretty strong transfer outcomes relative to students without prior dual enrollment,” Fink said. “The challenge is they’re not sort of representative of community college students. They’re more likely to be white and from high-income backgrounds, for example, so we have this challenge in terms of broadening access and ensuring that dual enrollment can really serve all high school students equitably.”
Fink said dual-enrollment students are important to consider because they can become “stealth transfers”—students who enroll at four-year institutions directly after high school but arrive having already accumulated college credits.
“This points to a real area of opportunity because the outcomes are so much stronger for dual-enrollment students,” Fink said. “If we can equalize access and really broaden the benefits of dual enrollment, we can therefore improve transfer outcomes at the order of magnitude that we’re really looking for in terms of improvement nationally.”
- Incremental progress on transfer isn’t enough.
Fink said that despite research showing the socioeconomic benefits associated with earning a bachelor’s degree, pathways to bachelor’s attainment remain particularly limited for community college students from underrepresented backgrounds.
“The numbers are still relatively small,” Fink said. “But if you talk five years in the future, given the outcomes of students who get a bachelor’s degree from community colleges, there are strong labor market outcomes.”
Wyner said he similarly wants to see significant growth in the share of students who start at a community college and ultimately earn a bachelor’s degree.
“John and I have been working together on this for 11 years now, and we’ve gone from 14 percent of community college–entering students getting a bachelor’s [degree] to 16 percent,” Wyner said. “We’re a big country, so we should feel good about that, but not too good. I want to see that get to 20 percent and 25 percent in the next five years, and I do think it’s possible.”
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