September-October 2001

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Transferability of Credits Increasingly at Issue

The pressure on colleges and universities to adopt standard formulas for transferring credits has grown in recent years along with the number of transfer students. More than half of students graduating from four-year public institutions began their undergraduate study at another institution, according to the Association of American Colleges and Universities. In addition to traditional "vertical" transfers from two-year to four-year institutions, colleges and universities face increasing numbers of "horizontal" transfers between institutions of the same kind, transfers from online or corporate education programs into traditional universities, and transfers from foreign to U.S. institutions.

"Credits carry a lot of weight for students-they are benchmarks representing progress toward a degree, and they show that certain requirements have been completed," says Ruth Flower, AAUP director of communications and public policy. Students need to accumulate credits in order to graduate, universities need to preserve the academic integrity of their degree programs, and everybody needs clear and sensible policies on transfer credit.

The 1978 Joint Statement on Transfer and Award of Academic Credit, developed by several leading higher education associations, delineates three main criteria for institutions to consider in making transfer decisions: the educational quality of the sending institution; the comparability of the nature, content, and level of credit earned to that offered by the receiving institution; and the appropriateness of the credit earned to the programs offered by the receiving institution in light of the student's educational goals.

The joint statement should continue to guide transfer decisions, says the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA), a group that coordinates the activities of accrediting organizations in the United States. But changes in the higher education landscape in the intervening years have made a reconsideration of the details necessary, the group says. In fall 2000 CHEA issued a statement on transfer credit that sets forth additional criteria by which transfer decisions should be made, emphasizing that institutions should be consistent and open to innovation, and should not base their decisions solely upon the accreditation status of the sending institution.

Most four-year, degree-granting institutions and nonprofit two-year institutions are accredited by regional agencies, but many for-profit technical colleges are accredited by separate national accrediting agencies. Students seeking to transfer from nationally accredited institutions to traditional, regionally accredited institutions often come in for a shock when they discover that their credits will not transfer. Although colleges and universities have the ultimate authority to determine their policies on accepting transfer credit, CHEA says, they should be careful not to reject transfer credit without offering clear explanations of why the work offered for credit is not comparable to their curricular and degree requirements.

Among those pushing for increased uniformity in college credit is the United States military, whose large and highly mobile workforce is especially likely to transfer between institutions. Along with other organizations, the military has assembled a network of colleges and universities that agree in advance to accept credit from other participating institutions.

The Institute for Higher Education Policy is looking at the problem from another angle, by asking whether the standard "student credit hour" used by many institutions to count student progress toward a degree remains useful. This measure, based on the number of hours a week students spend in the classroom, may not be applicable to such educational enterprises as online courses or service learning.

"Credits are small pieces of the higher education puzzle," says Flower. "We're having a hard time agreeing on how the pieces fit because we don't have a clear picture of what the puzzle represents."