Ed. Department, Congress Focus On Community College Transfer of Credit Problem
For low-income students, paying for college is hard enough without having to repeat courses. That’s why U.S. Department of Education Secretary Margaret Spellings and many scholars are looking for answers that will help more students transfer credits when they move from one higher education institution to another.
http://diverseeducation.com/artman/publish/article_8195.shtml
July 12th, 2007 at 1:47 am
Spellings’ statement is nonsense. Evidently, neither she nor the people who feed her numbers read their own Department’s research. First, it’s not the percentage of students who “say” they want to transfer—it’s the percentage who actually do transfer. Second, to analyze what’s happening, you have to split your daughter from your brother-in-law, i.e. traditional-age beginning community college students, who, as ED’s own research shows, transfer at a 37% rate, versus older beginning community college students, who transfer at a rate closer to 20%. Second, and again documented in ED’s published research, 60% of the traditional-age students who transfer earn a bachelor’s degree within 8 years (and if we gave them 11 or 12 years, that rate rises to over 70%). That’s hardly a failure rate. So what’s going on here? The Department is trying to use
scare numbers to get in to the same issues it raised when it was trying to stick its nose even further into the accreditation process through negotiated rulemaking—and failed. Yes, there are some problems with credit transfer, and yes, students from the lower bands of SES are not as successful in the transfer path as students from upper bands (but that’s also true no matter what measure of “success” in higher education we talk about). But the credit transfer problem is not as outrageous as the Secretary’s statement implies, and is tractable. So work on it through better monitoring of articulation agreements, and don’t let ED in the door of regulation. If they can’t read their own research, you can imagine how they will mess up the landscape.