Texas leads in national push toward so-called reverse transfer
Afunny thing happened on Reddit this summer: A link from the National Student Clearinghouse, a higher education research group, went viral. The post to a “Life Pro Tips” forum encouraged users to check out the Clearinghouse’s reverse transfer initiative.
Here’s how the exchange works. Say a student starts her postsecondary education at a community college but transfers those credits to a four-year university before earning an associate’s degree.
If she attended institutions that participate in the Clearinghouse’s program, she can ask the university and college to track her credit completion at the four-year school.
She’ll then learn automatically when she has enough credits to retroactively earn an associate’s
from that initial institution — and then get the degree.
The post drew more than 100 people to contact the Clearinghouse about the process, the group said in a news release. But what is a novel initiative elsewhere in the U.S. has already been somewhat standardized in Texas.
State law requires universities to track every student who transfers from a community college to that university with 30 credits — half of what’s necessary to earn an associate’s degree. After students complete about 30 additional credit hours at the university, that institution gives the community college the student’s transcript to review for an associate’s degree.
Some programs have a lower benchmark for
who is tracked than the state Legislature requires. In El Paso, the University of Texas at El Paso and El Paso Community College have an automatic reverse transfer system that requires fewer community college credits to participate. The Clearinghouse highlighted the schools’ program in recent promotional materials.
“Students who transfer to UTEP with at least 25 percent of an associate degree completed are tracked and then notified when they have earned enough credit to be awarded an associate degree,” the American Association of Community Colleges wrote in a 2014 outline of how to implement automatic graduation programs.
Coordination at that level can be challenging. In 2015, Texas universities participating in a reverse transfer initiative found that there were limited fiscal and human resources and no mechanism for consistent communication between universities and students, creating some challenges for systems.
Lone Star College graduated more than 1,000 reverse transfer students in the 2014-15 academic year, of about 7,600 transcripts received, according to that report. About 680 more needed two or fewer classes to earn an associate’s.
There are 2 million students nationwide who attended college for two years between 2003 and 2013 without earning a degree, according to 2014 research from the Clearinghouse. Separately, 78 percent of students who transfer from a community college to a university do so without a degree.