For decades, students transferring between colleges was a side road in American higher education. Today, it’s one of the system’s main highways.
The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reports that nearly 1.2 million students, or roughly 13%, transferred to a new institution, an increase of nearly 8% since 2020, prompting Madi Turner of the Oakland Post to call these students “the transfer generation.”
Nearly half of these students move from two-year to four-year institutions, making community colleges a primary launch point for students seeking a bachelor’s degree.
But the transfer pathway is far less dependable than it should be. It’s confusing, inconsistent and costly for those who depend on it, wasting time, credits, money and momentum. What should be a bridge too often becomes a barrier.
A report from the LEARN Commission explains why. It’s a failure of learning mobility or the system colleges use to evaluate and apply learning across institutions. That system is fragmented, opaque and labor-intensive. Decisions are scattered across departments, with little attention to student outcomes.
A rocky path to the baccalaureate
Transfer dysfunction isn’t just a matter of bureaucracy. It reflects a deeper failure to build a coherent, student-centered system for recognizing learning across institutions and turning it into progress toward a credential.
That’s why transfer is not a niche issue. It’s at the center of questions about college affordability, social mobility, institutional enrollment and bachelor’s degree attainment. If the system worked better, it would create a more reliable path to upward mobility.
When colleges build strong transfer partnerships, they expand access to bachelor’s degrees for low-income students, working adults, first-generation students, and others who need a flexible starting point.
The Community College Research Center (CCRC) and the Aspen Institute show that transfers can be a powerful engine of bachelor’s attainment when institutions build pathways rather than leaving students to navigate a maze. But the discouraging news is that national outcomes are weaker than student aspirations.
The Student Clearinghouse reports that only 31.6% of first-time students who started at a community college in fall 2018 transferred to a four-year institution within six years. Of those who did transfer, 48.7% completed a bachelor’s degree within six years.
The handoff between institutions is one of the biggest weaknesses. Students often discover that their earned credits don’t count as they expected.
A Government Accountability Office report found that students who transferred between 2004 and 2009 lost 43% of their credits on average. Credit loss is American higher education’s hidden tax.
Better execution
This isn’t only a paperwork issue. It’s a design issue. The best colleges don’t merely accept transfer students. They build transfer into program architecture, advising, scheduling and data systems.
According to the Aspen Institute and CCRC, if lower-performing colleges matched top-performing ones, the bachelor’s attainment rate for community college students could double from 16% to 32%.
The problem isn’t inevitability. It’s execution. The best transfer systems make pathways visible from the start. Students should know, early and clearly, which courses count, which majors align, which credits transfer as a block and what milestones matter.
At least 31 states have policies requiring a transferable core of lower-division courses and statewide guaranteed transfer of an associate degree, with some states adopting common course numbering. Those are structural reforms that reduce guesswork and protect student progress.
Promising progress
There are signs of movement in that direction. Colleges and systems are building meta-majors, clearer transfer maps, dual-admission arrangements and more deliberate community-college-to-university partnerships.
The Transfer Playbook highlights strategies that create a more coherent pathway to the bachelor’s degree. These approaches point toward a better future where transferring isn’t a leap across an institutional gap but a planned sequence.
Take the case of Campus, formerly MTI College, an online two-year college, enrolling around 4,000 students, more than 90% of whom receive Pell grants. It’s a model built around structured transfer.
Courses are delivered live, online from faculty who also teach at institutions like the University of California-Berkeley, Vanderbilt and Howard. Students receive a laptop, free Wi-Fi access and a personal success coach.
Most importantly, Campus has built a transfer partner network of 33 bachelor’s degree-granting institutions that show students — up front — how their credits will apply. Instead of guessing, students can see a clear path from day one.
Campus Chancellor Tade Oyerinde put it to me bluntly: “Transfer policy in American higher education defies basic reasoning. If College A accepts credit from College B as equivalent, and College B accepts credit from College C, then by definition, College A should accept credits from College C. Instead, students get stuck retaking classes they don’t need, wasting time and money, literally violating the transitive property. Until that stops, higher ed isn’t serious about affordability or earning Gen Z’s trust.”
This kind of clarity is still the exception. That matters at a moment when public confidence in higher education is under strain. Gallup finds that the share of Americans with high confidence in colleges has fallen from 57% in 2015 to 36% in 2024, with only a modest rebound since. When pathways are confusing and costly, trust erodes. A broken transfer system isn’t just inefficient, it’s a credibility problem.
Five suggestions for improvement
Here are five suggestions for what should be done.
First, create transparent transfer pathways. States should require program-level maps showing how credits apply to specific majors, not simply whether they’re accepted in the abstract.
Second, build dual-admission and co-enrollment models. The strongest partnerships admit students into a transfer pathway from the beginning and provide advising across institutions.
Third, hold institutions accountable for transfer outcomes. Receiving institutions control the key barriers, such as how credits are evaluated, whether majors accept them, and how students are advised after arrival. Four-year institutions need to be responsible for results.
Fourth, measure and publish credit loss information. Much of transfer dysfunction persists because it’s hidden. Institutions should collect student-level data on denied and accepted coursework. What gets measured gets fixed. What remains invisible gets rationalized.
Fifth, advising should begin with the destination, not just enrollment. Students should choose courses and programs based on an intended field of study and likely transfer destination. Meta-majors, guided pathways and early major planning are not silver bullets. But they are far better than asking students to assemble a degree from disconnected credits.
“Students today are navigating higher education in ways that are more flexible than ever before,” says Doug Shapiro, executive director of the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
But college transfer remains too fragile in practice.
At its best, transfer offers a lower-cost, higher-opportunity route to a degree and beyond. At its worst, it becomes a detour with lost credits, delayed graduation, and broken expectations.
The next stage of reform should aim not merely to make transfer possible, but to make it dependable.
