The Government Accountability Office says college and university transfer policies increase costs to students and taxpayers and should be streamlined. Community college graduates must take an average of 10 more hours and add three months to their college careers, a GAO report concluded.
Additional tuition, the GAO says, could cost students $150 per credit hour for a public institution and $520 for a private institution.
The recommendation was part of a report requested by Republican higher education leaders in both the House and the Senate as Congress continues to consider reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. Specifically, the GAO wants the Higher Education Act to include legislation to require higher-education institutions eligible for financial aid funding from the federal government to issue a statement regarding the school’s credit transfer policy.
According to the GAO’s report, students across the country encounter problems when attempting to transfer credits from one institution to the next. Some institutions, according to the report, accept only credits from regional accreditation agencies and not from national accreditation agencies.
A regional accreditation agency is more likely to accredit colleges in states that typically border each other, while national organizations focus on specialized institutions and have more recently attempted to align their curriculum with more traditional four-year colleges, the report says.
In 2001, 40 percent of students entering college during the 1995-1996 academic year attended at least two institutions during the next six years. Each year the federal government spends more than $20 billion on higher-education programs. In 2004, the spending was $21 billion.
“A student’s inability to transfer credit may result in longer enrollment, more tuition payments, and additional federal financial aid,” the report says. Data is not available to suggest what the costs would be on the federal government and taxpayers, the report adds.
Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said the Higher Education Act included some of the recommendations from the GAO report.
“It’s important that we give students some assurances that they will not have to repeat classes they have already taken when transferring to another school — and that we provide them help to find out where their credits will be accepted,” Enzi said.
The report found that 69 percent of higher-education institutions had some form of an agreement with institutions in regional accreditation agencies. Some institutions also have agreements through state legislation or other statewide initiatives to allow for transfer of credits between institutions within a state.
In 1996, the N.C. General Assembly approved legislation that required the Board of Governors and the State Board of Community Colleges to work on a credit transfer plan between institutions within the community college system and the university system.
North Carolina is also ahead of the GAO report on the recommendation to provide information about transferring credits. In 1995, the Assembly passed a bill to require the Board of Governors and the community college system to develop a plan to provide students with information on transferring credits among community colleges and between community colleges and the UNC system.
Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, chairman of the House Education and Workforce Committee, said the report shows that the rules need to be more flexible for today’s college students, who are more apt to transfer than before.
“[I]t has become more important than ever to ensure that college students are free to transfer from one institution to another without unfairly losing credit for quality courses they have completed,” he said in a statement.
Shannon Blosser ([email protected]) is a staff writer with the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy in Chapel Hill.