Representatives Miller and Hinojosa Tackle Higher Ed’s Credit Crisis

Higher ed made a mainstream splash this week with the announcement that 12 more prestigious universities would provide hundreds of free Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Unfortunately, none of these schools plan to offer the courses for credit. And since degrees are made up of credits, learning without them doesn’t amount to much. Just ask a group of students who systematically pay for—and lose—college credits: transfer students.

The majority of students attend more than one college before graduating. But students who transfer are often dismayed to discover that the courses they spent real time and money on at one institution don’t “count” at another. The real world consequences of transfer loss were eloquently explained at yesterday’s House hearing on college affordability by Joe May, head of Louisiana’s community college system. Until recently, a Louisiana community college student with an associate’s degree typically lost between 21 and 24 credit hours upon transferring. For full-time students, that’s a year of time and money lost. For part-time students, this could mean up to four years. And for many students, it may mean never even finishing a degree. So higher education leaders like May worked with the Louisiana legislature to fix it. They established a transfer degree that would be accepted by all of the state’s public institutions, established a general education core common to all institutions, and required common course numbering. 

Louisiana took an opaque, broken system that cost students hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars and made it work. The average transfer student now saves $2,117, the state saves $1,930 per transfer, and the feds save $2,750 per Pell student who transfers with an associate’s degree. This is good stuff. And we need more of it. Enter the Transferring Credits for College Completion Act of 2012, introduced this week by Representatives George Miller (D-CA) and Rubén Hinojosa (D-TX).

This legislation would do a few things. It would help colleges focus on serving transfer students by requiring them to report graduation rates for this population (these students are currently not counted). It would require all institutions that receive federal financial aid to be more transparent with students about their transfer options by listing in course catalogues whether classes are transferrable to state institutions. And finally, it asks public institutions within states to do much of what Louisiana has already done: establish a common general education core—with common course numbering—and guarantee that an associate’s degree will count for the first two years of related four-year program.

Great news, right?

I’m not so sure traditional higher education will see it that way. “Leave it to the states and institutions,” I can already hear.  The problem is that we have left it to state and institutions—and students have paid the price. If every state were as committed to transfer student success as Louisiana, we wouldn’t need to have this conversation. If traditional higher ed doesn’t support the bill, I’m looking forward to hearing their alternatives, because students and taxpayers cannot afford the status quo.