......Yet the U.S. Department of Education
says, on average, a transfer student still loses 13 credits already earned and paid for. That's more than a semester's worth of work, or, for all of those students collectively, the equivalent of 186,000 years of college. About four in 10 have no credits transfer at all, and are forced to begin from scratch, the Education Department's National Center for Education Statistics
reports.
"Making people redo this stuff is ridiculous," DeJager says. "It's just a rip-off. People talk about the student loan bubble, and this is one of the reasons it's happening."....
Problems persist within states, too, especially for students who transfer from community colleges,
according to the research organization Education Northwest. That's in part because even when universities accept community college credits, those credits often don't apply toward what's needed for a degree in a particular major...
"The problem now is that students don't even find out how much transfer credit they're going to get until after they enroll" in their second or third institutions, says Michael Falk, founder and CEO of National College Transfer Center...
Whatever happens will have to overcome a transfer system that has proven not only intractable, but so cumbersome that
a report by the research arm of the College Board, which administers the SAT college admissions examination, labeled it "an academic gauntlet." The report said students who want to transfer face insufficient information, "nonexistent or indecipherable policies," and "enormous complexity."....
"I had a woman crying to me on the phone, literally crying, because she thought she was a first-semester senior and they told her she was still a first-semester freshman" because her credits didn't transfer from one school to another, Falk recounts.
The impact is enormous. Having to repeat courses when they transfer is one reason students now take an average of more than five years to earn a bachelor's degree,
according to the National Student Clearinghouse,
significantly increasing their cost.
Students who start at community colleges and plan to ultimately earn bachelor's degrees are less likely to get one than their counterparts who start at four-year universities, not because they are less well prepared or get less financial aid,
one study found, but because so many of their credits don't transfer.
The burden falls most heavily on low-income students, who often start at community colleges to save money with the intention of transferring to four-year universities, the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University,
reported. (The Hechinger Report, which produced this story, is housed at Teachers College.)
"It's those students that are at a disadvantage, yet again," Marling says.
Relying on students to solve the problem, she says, may be unrealistic. Sure, says Marling, it's important to provide more counseling about the process, but "to have them figure it out in advance would be really hard" – especially for low-income students whose parents didn't go to college. "
These are not individuals who question authority."
One former community college student who took part in a focus group Marling ran, she says, "did all the right things. She came up with a degree plan, met with an adviser at her college." Then she moved to a four-year university and sat down with an administrator there, "who said, 'No, these credits won't transfer.'"
That's similar to the welcome DeJager says she got both times she changed schools. "'We don't really know what they taught you,'" she says she was told. "'Can't you contact the college and get a copy of the curriculum?'" she responded. "And they say, 'No.'....
