Transferability of Postsecondary Credit Following Student Transfer or Coenrollment. Statistical Analysis Report. NCES 2014-163
Author: Simone, Sean Anthony
Date: 2014-08-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: College Credits,College Transfer Students,Transfer Policy,Colleges,Decision Making,State Government,Government Role,Agency Cooperation,Federal Government,Student Financial Aid,School Policy,Undergraduate Students,Institutional Characteristics,Student Characteristics,Grade Point Average,Academic Degrees,Transcripts (Written Records),Student Records,Multivariate Analysis,Statistical Analysis

The federal government invests billions of dollars in grants and loans to help students access and complete postsecondary education. Federal policymakers, therefore, have had a continuing interest in understanding the ability of students to transfer credits between postsecondary institutions. In 2005, the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee and the House Education and Workforce Committee requested that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) examine factors that influence the transferability of postsecondary credit. The GAO considered: (1) how postsecondary education institutions decide which credits to accept for transfer; (2) how states and accrediting agencies facilitate the credit transfer process; and (3) the implications for students and the federal government of students' inability to transfer credits (GAO 2005). More recently, the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 required institutions participating in Title IV student aid programs to disclose additional information about their policies surrounding the transfer of credit. Given that policymakers have identified the transfer of credit as an issue of interest, this report examines how often, and under what conditions, postsecondary institutions accept the transfer of credits earned by students at other institutions. Using transcript data from the 2004/09 Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study (BPS:04/09), this report addresses the following questions: (1) How often do members of a cohort of beginning college students transfer or coenroll between postsecondary education institutions during their undergraduate years? (2) How often, and in what amounts, do credits transfer when students move from one institution to another? and (3) What characteristics of institutions (i.e., control, level, accreditation, and selectivity) and students (i.e., grade point average [GPA] and degree/award level of program) are related to credit transfer? This report addresses these questions in three chapters. Chapter 1 addresses the first two research questions, providing nationally representative estimates of the number of undergraduate students who transferred from their first institution and whether the credits they earned were transferred to destination institutions. Chapter 2 documents the relationship between selected student or institutional characteristics and credit transfer. Finally, because credit transfer may be associated with these student and institutional characteristics in combination, chapter 3 reports the results of a multivariate analysis designed to control for these variables' joint associations with credit transfer. Six appendices are included: (1) Glossary; (2) Technical Notes and Methodology; (3) Figure and Standard Error Tables; (4) Multiple Transfer Students; (5) Missing Case Analysis for Multivariate Model; and (6) Factors That Predict the Probability of Inflated Zero Credits Transferring.