College Transfer Blues

Laura Dempsey, a civil rights lawyer and Army wife, writes in the Washington Post about the many reasons it's hard for her to maintain a career. Among them:

Wives attending college when their service members transfer must choose between paying exorbitant out-of-state tuition if they stay behind or losing a substantial number of credits if they move. Although many smaller and online universities admirably volunteer to accept transferred credits for military wives, most of the country's larger public universities and almost none of the top-tier private schools do.

This is a good opportunity to point out that the "system" of tranferring college credit in this country is a mess, much more so than most people realize. Colleges start with the baseline presumption that credits earned at other colleges are no good. Then they intermittently create "articulation" arrangements with other institutions, often on department-by-department ore even course-by-course basis, most commonly within state university systems or between systems within states. Absent those arrangements, they just decide which credits they'll accept however they like. It's a completely non-transparent and idiosyncratic process, and the worst thing about it is that students don't find out how many of their credits will be accepted by the college they're transferring to until after they apply and decide to go.

This is partly because we live in a big country with a lot of colleges that are governed in a very decentralized way, so there's no clean public policy solution from a national perspective. But there's also an element of institutional hubris -- departments tend to think that the standards for introductory Econ or what have you at that other institution just aren't up to snuff, when in fact most of the courses students take as undergraduates aren't all that different regardless of where they're taught.

There's also a financial element -- it's not in a college's best interests to make it really easy for students to transfer out, and when they accept students who transfer in, every credit they reject is a credit students will have to pay to re-take. Market pressures don't fix the problem because students don't usually transfer many times, so it's a case where they don't know they're going to get the shaft until they've gotten it, and once they've gotten it they're never in a position to avoid getting it again.

Only students in special circumstances that result in serial transfers--like Army wives--come to realize just how absurd and inefficient the system is, likely resulting in billions of dollars per year of wasted time and money that could be better spent elsewhere.