Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Community colleges are the entry point for many students who aspire to attain a four-year degree, but few transfer and even fewer earn bachelor’s degrees. Recent estimates suggest that while over 80 percent of entering community college students intend to attain a bachelor’s degree or higher, within six years only one third have transferred to a four-year institution and less than 15 percent have earned a bachelor’s degree (Jenkins & Fink, 2016). One of the major impediments to the success of community college students in the four-year sector is the inefficiency of the credit transfer process, as evidenced by Monaghan and Attewell’s (2014) study using national survey data on the effect of transferability of credits on transfer student bachelor completion. Yet, credit transferability alone is an insufficient definition of transfer efficiency. We argue that the efficiency of the transfer process can be defined in three ways: transferability of credit, applicability of transfer credit toward students’ program of study, and the amount of excess credits taken among bachelor’s degree completers. Thus, transfer efficiency not only depends on institutional structures and policies related to the transfer process, but also on students’ course-taking behaviors.

In this paper, we explore three different measurements of transfer efficiency: transferability of credits, applicability of credits towards bachelor's degree and specific program of study, and excess credits. Transferability of credits is measured by the number of community college credits accepted by the four-year college; applicability of credits is measured by the number of credits applied to students degree program; and excess credits is measured by the total number of credits taken at any institution in excess of student’s degree requirement. In order to conduct these alternative measurements, we obtained data from different states and utilize the entire transcript for each student in the college system. Taking advantage of common course numbering, course equivalency libraries, and articulation agreements with each state, we could observe the equivalence of courses across different institutions.

Together, we examine transcripts of entering cohorts of community college students who subsequently transferred to four-year colleges to (a) test the relationship between definitions of transfer efficiency and bachelor’s degree completion, (b) examine student- and institution-level factors that explain efficient transfer; and (c) compare the efficiency of credit transfer among three states.