More than three in four Americans now view college as unaffordable. With the steady drumbeat of headlines about student debt and questions about the value of a degree, it’s hard to blame them. Yet a bachelor’s degree remains a powerful driver of economic mobility. Rebuilding public trust in higher education will require expanding affordable routes to that outcome. And that may begin with finally realizing the full potential of one of the most common ways students move through higher education: transfer.
While the traditional 2+2 pathway is still the most affordable route to a bachelor’s degree, transfer rarely works as intended. Few students ever make the jump, and even fewer graduate. As president of a two-year college, I’ve seen how this breakdown stems from a disconnect between two-year and four-year institutions. It persists for a reason. Institutions face hard decisions shaped by accreditation requirements, faculty governance and legitimate concerns about academic rigor.
But over the past year, I’ve also seen what’s possible when institutions work together more deliberately. Campus has now partnered with dozens of four-year institutions to build more transfer-friendly routes for students. Here’s what we’ve learned.
Stop Making Students Guess
For many students, transfer is confusing. They pick courses without being fully sure how they will apply to their ultimate degree. They get mixed messages about requirements. They discover too late that the path they thought they were on is longer or more expensive than they had been led to believe. Transfer pathways should be clear and navigable from the beginning. Students should be able to see, in concrete terms, how their coursework connects to a bachelor’s degree and should receive a consistent message across advisers, departments and partner institutions.
Our partnership with Texas Tech University, for example, centers on credit mobility from the start. Rather than treating credit clarity as a downstream concern, Campus and Texas Tech designed their articulation agreement to ensure alignment on course quality and equivalency policies so that credits apply exactly as students expect. As Clay Taylor, senior director of academic partnerships at Texas Tech, put it, “We believe students shouldn’t have to guess how their credits will apply to a degree.”
Design Transfer Pathways That Lead to Completion
At the most fundamental level, transfer challenges arise because credit is not consistently accepted and applied within bachelor’s degree programs. Four-year institutions have established processes to review prior coursework, but even accepted credits don’t always count toward a student’s chosen field of study. Program requirements, sequencing and program accreditation constraints often result in credits being applied as electives or not applied at all, even when the learning is relevant. As a result, students lose time, incur additional costs and struggle to progress toward a degree.
Stronger alignment between two- and four-year institutions helps ensure that coursework is not only recognized but meaningfully applied. This might come through articulation agreements, but it can also come from stronger collaboration. When pathways are clearly defined and consistently communicated, students are better able to understand how their coursework will advance them toward a bachelor’s degree, rather than discovering too late that they have taken credits that do not count.
Ensure Associate Degree Completion
One of the most effective ways to strengthen transfer outcomes is also among the easiest to overlook: ensuring students complete an associate degree before they move on to a four-year institution. When students arrive at a four-year institution with a credential already in hand, they are better prepared to navigate the transition and more likely to persist through its challenges and earn a degree.
Credential completion should be embedded in the transfer journey rather than treated as a separate objective. Clear degree maps, proactive advising and defined milestones can all help keep students on track. In some of our partnerships, this expectation is built directly into the transfer process. The partnership between Campus and Mississippi State University, for instance, is structured around students completing an associate degree before transferring, bringing a minimum of 60 credits toward a bachelor’s degree with them. This helps create a more consistent and supportive experience for students as they move between institutions.
Support Students at Every Step
Even the most seamless transfer system will still involve complicated decisions. Students are changing institutions, navigating new requirements and trying to stay on track academically and financially at the same time. Too often, students learn too late in the process how program or course selection at the associate stage will affect their experience at the bachelor’s stage.
Students need access to advising that starts early and continues throughout their entire educational journey. They need someone to help them interpret the information in front of them, spot trouble before challenges snowball and connect short-term choices to longer-term goals. The best support isn’t focused only on the next semester’s schedule but the entire arc of a degree program, even when that arc spans multiple institutions.
A more collaborative approach, such as the one between Rutgers Business School–Newark and Campus, increases transparency and student success by maintaining open lines of communication to identify individuals interested in transferring and any obstacles they may encounter. Effective student pathways between community colleges and universities are built on this kind of proactive relationship.
Build Shared Accountability for Student Outcomes
Strong partnerships require more than alignment at the point of transfer. They require shared accountability for what happens next. Too often, institutions lose visibility into students’ outcomes after they leave campus, making it difficult to know whether transfer pathways are truly delivering on their promise.
Effective collaboration relies on transparency and the responsible use of aggregated data. This requires clear expectations for how student outcomes are tracked and shared over time. By looking beyond enrollment to measures such as persistence, academic performance and degree attainment, institutions can better understand how transfer students are progressing—all while ensuring data is handled securely and in compliance with FERPA.
When institutions operate in parallel rather than in partnership, students are the ones who pay the price. If colleges and universities want to prove they are still dedicated to access, affordability and completion, fixing transfer would be a good place to start.
