Improving Transferability

The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges is doing what accreditors should do. They've created a prototype Transfer Credit Consortium to serve as a common transfer pathway to increase credit transferability, flexibility and accessibility among colleges and universities.

The voluntary, faculty-led initiative has so far brought together more than 160 institutions. The goal is to grow the consortium and begin measuring its impact and efficacy by fall 2027. I'm intrigued and encouraged by this initiative because it's not a stale and tired regional articulation press release. It appears to be a genuine access project. And of course, I believe it's the type of initiative that private universities should locate in their schools and colleges of professional, continuing & online studies. PCE/O units already run the machinery open transfer initiatives like this require. They've been doing transcript evaluation at speed, credit-mapping against multiple curricula and program requirements, prior-learning assessment, and advising for students who arrive mid-stream. 

Tactics like this matter more now because mid-tier tuition-dependent private universities have no choice but to get good at credit transfer. The pool of full-pay 18-year-olds is evaporating and every private in the country is chasing community college and public-university transfers to fill the gap (some doing it better than others). Private tuition runs near $55,000 per year against $12,000 in-state at public four-years, but what students actually pay after aid averages $20,000 at private nonprofits. So the math can actually work for privates who have the courage to suspend their adherence to fading perceptions of their brand. Permit your PCE/O unit to build and scale community college partnerships with broad, progressive and accessible credit transfer. Release the death grip you have on an elitist belief that a course is only as rigorous as the institution that taught it. Stop (PLEASE STOP) touting gaudy institutional prestige as academic quality control. Authorize you PCE/O unit to replace ad hoc, course-by-course faculty gatekeeping with outcomes-based evaluations built to run equivalencies at volume. Shift the burden of proof from the transfer student back onto the university (the one ostensibly "welcoming to all") and turn transfer credit into a defensible, and scalable enrollment strategy.