Much of the prior research on improving transfer focuses on structures and constraints at community colleges. Yet, powerful university actors shape the infrastructure (such as information and transfer agreements) and the processes (for example, recruitment, admissions and articulation) necessary to support vertical transfer. Many of the key barriers to transfer, including opaque transfer policies, complex bureaucratic processes and inadequate information about credit portability, are deeply influenced by universities.
Transfer-intending students often experience confusion about how to select courses and degrees, especially given their desire to avoid credit loss when they transfer. They turn to actors at their community colleges for guidance but are often met with insufficient support services and out-of-date information.
This article is an excerpt from the new book Discredited: Power, Privilege, and Community College Transfer (Harvard Education Press, 2024) by Lauren Schudde and Huriya Jabbar. It is reprinted with permission.
University actors have more up-to-date information but don’t typically offer prospective transfer students guidance on pre-transfer course-taking. Instead, students primarily interact with admissions officers at universities closer to their application date, when they often receive generic guidance that is not applicable to their specific needs or, at times, information — especially about credit transfer and major requirements — that conflicts with what they learned from their community college.
Many credit transfer decisions and major course requirements are determined by university actors, typically (though sometimes indirectly) by faculty who determine program curricula. Faculty and administrators at less-inclusive institutions — universities deemed “selective” that do not rely on transfer students for enrollment management — seek to preserve their institution’s prestige and selectivity. Among faculty and staff at these less inclusive institutions, (mis)conceptions about transfer students can manifest through an emphasis on rigor or concerns about accepting courses from other institutions and serve as a hindrance to building a transfer-receptive institutional culture.
Negative perceptions of transfer have negative repercussions for students — universities without transfer-receptive cultures appear to contribute to poor transfer outcomes for community college students. Though often shaped by faculty, university program requirements are often then filtered through university admissions (and community college personnel) before reaching transfer-intending students. Universities exert their power through admissions requirements and through strategic enrollment management decisions, where admissions staff enact the faculty and administration’s vision.
Four-year institutions often have complex application processes requiring students to complete multiple steps, such as writing application essays, acquiring letters of recommendation, and sending transcripts to the destination institutions, which can be intimidating for students, especially those who have not had to apply to colleges before. Although the process of “transfer” is typically conceived of as a one-time process, many transfer-intending students go through several rounds of applications and decision-making about transfer destinations, resulting in greater application costs, time, effort and, sometimes, exhaustion with the process overall.
Through these processes, particularly the bureaucratic red tape involved in applications, universities send implicit messages about who belongs in higher education. In these ways, the power of four-year institutions — and the policies and practices they enact — substantially shape community college students’ transfer trajectories. Thus far, however, the power of universities in shaping the transfer landscape has been largely omitted from scholarship and policy debates.
Shifting the focus to the transfer field
Although the structuralist perspective highlights how community colleges can create and improve support services for students, it fails to examine institutional transfer from a field level, where actors from across multiple organizations, including community college advisors, university admissions personnel and other staff, interact with each other and with students. In many higher education systems, which historically faced less scrutiny and accountability than K–12 systems, institutions are tenuously linked, with individual colleges emphasizing their own autonomy.
Some state policy contexts privilege institutional autonomy more than others, with consequences for transfer pathways and outcomes. Navigating transfer pathways in states with “institution-driven” transfer systems, which give individual institutions more power in shaping transfer requirements, is more challenging for students and advising staff than in states with “2+2” systems, where lower-division courses taken at a community college count as the first two years of a degree at state universities.
In institution-driven contexts, universities have more control in crafting and filtering policy information. Transfer processes are complicated by these broader higher education structures. Tensions arise as individual colleges seek their own goals and enact their own procedures for transfer with little regard for other institutions and the needs of students. Both advisors and students are left to navigate the complex information structures that exist because of intersecting and overlapping institutional priorities. Examining that context and how students and staff interact with each other in this landscape can offer greater insights into the challenges community college students face in attaining their educational goals. There is a need to look beyond community colleges to the system level, including public universities and even high schools.
Although scholars and policymakers have highlighted how community colleges, as institutions, can create and improve support services for students, transforming transfer will require moving beyond a singular focus on community colleges. To understand why and under what conditions students successfully transfer, we need to examine the broader environment, including the interorganizational processes and dynamics among community colleges, universities and state agencies. Processes at both the sending and prospective receiving institutions shape student experiences and outcomes. The role of universities in community college transfer is often overlooked, despite the significant power these institutions hold in shaping transfer processes. By studying institutional transfer at the interorganizational, or field, level, we will further illuminate students’ educational pathways, the barriers they face, and how field-level tensions shape their experiences.
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Lauren Schudde is an associate professor of educational leadership and policy at the University of Texas at Austin. She studies how to ameliorate social inequities in the U.S. through higher education policy.
Huriya Jabbar is an associate professor of education policy in the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California. Her research uses sociological and critical theories to examine how market-based ideas in PK–12 and higher education shape inequality, opportunity and democracy in the U.S.