Getting to Graduation: The Completion Agenda in Higher Education

8. Equalizing Credits and Rewarding Skills: Credit Portability and Bachelor’s Degree Attainment

chapter eight Equalizing Credits and Rewarding Skills Credit Portability and Bachelor’s Degree Attainment josipa roksa College for all” has become a mantra of policymakers and foundations alike. In his first speech to a joint session of Congress in February 2009, President Barack Obama pledged: “We will provide the support necessary for you to complete college and meet a new goal: by 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.”1 Many foundations have expressed similar goals, including the Lumina Foundation for Education, whose Goal 2025 aims to increase the percentage of Americans with high-quality degrees and credentials to 60 percent by 2025.2 These commitments represent a recent shift in the national agenda, from focusing primarily on access to highlighting the issue of degree completion. American higher education has historically been much more successful at facilitating access than degree completion. Between the high school cohorts of 1972 and 1992, the rate of entry into higher education increased from 48 percent to 71 percent while the bachelor’s degree completion rate decreased: 51 percent of the class of 1972 and 46 percent of the class of 1992 graduated with a bachelor’s degree within eight years.3 A different way of examining the issue is to consider the educational attainment of different birth cohorts, which reveals that over the course of the twentieth century, the proportion of young adults with some college has increased, but the proportion with a bachelor’s degree has at best remained stable.4 Amid the growing focus on degree completion, students’ trajectories through higher education are gaining increasing attention. Even a cursory examination reveals that institutions operate under a premise of institutional autonomy, which gives them independence in crafting curricula and determining whether and how specific courses count toward their degrees. Students, on the other hand, operate under what could be 201 “ 202 the relationship between policy and completion referred to as a premise of credit portability, which assumes that one earns a degree by accumulating credits at multiple institutions. Students act on their premise: many of them attend more than one institution and are disappointed when credits they have earned at one institution do not count toward a degree at another. An example provided recently in the Chronicle of Higher Education sounds much too familiar: Take a student who completes Technical Mathematics I for four credits at Bronx Community College, and consider the system’s wacky credittransfer rules. If that student transferred to CUNY’s College of Staten Island, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, or New York City College of Technology, those credits would be accepted as if for a similar course offered there (although for only three credits at John Jay). At three other senior colleges in the system, the Bronx course would transfer only as elective credit, which tends not to count toward a major. Only Staten Island would apply the transfer credit toward general-education requirements. And five other colleges in the system wouldn’t accept transfer credit at all—unless, in two cases, the student had completed an associate degree.5 The lack of consistency and transparency, even within a specific educational system, is remarkable. These types of observations have helped to generate an impression that credit portability (transfer of credits across postsecondary institutions, particularly from two-year to four-year schools) is a key hindrance to bachelor’s degree attainment. A related expectation is that removing barriers to credit transfer, particularly for students transferring from two-year to four-year institutions, would substantially increase bachelor’s degree attainment. This expectation is not supported by currently available research. While the research is not definitive and there are still unanswered questions, there is no convincing empirical evidence to suggest that streamlining credit transfer would increase degree attainment. This does not mean that the transfer process should not be more transparent and consistent. But it does mean that focusing on credit transfer as a primary strategy for increasing bachelor’s degree attainment is not advisable. Patterns of Multi-Institutional Attendance Students’ pathways through higher education have grown increasingly complex, with multi-institutional attendance becoming the modal pat- Equalizing Credits and Rewarding Skills 203 tern. In the sample examined in this chapter, just over 50 percent of students attended multiple institutions and approximately 20 percent attended more than two. Multi-institutional attendance is prevalent among students who begin in...