The typical postsecondary student of 2024 accumulates credits from multiple sources and attends multiple institutions before earning a credential. Yet many of our state, system, and institutional policies and practices have not adapted to this reality.

To help address this challenge and support the higher education community in better serving today’s mobile students, Ithaka S+R and Complete College America are collaborating on a new, multi-faceted project, with funding from Ascendium Education Group. Through conducting research, launching a cohort of networks of institutions, and developing a practical playbook, we will surface and share new insights and concrete steps to advance policies, technology, and practices that promote a student-centered, holistic approach to credit mobility.

As credit accumulation options have proliferated, student mobility patterns have also shifted and are now increasingly multi-directional, crossing institutional types, system and state boundaries, and occurring over longer periods of time. Adult learners may complete military or corporate training, obtain credit for prior learning through a competency-based examination, or accumulate credits at multiple institutions along their educational journey. Additionally, high school students routinely earn college credit through dual enrollment programs or exam scores on AP or IB exams.

In fact, 45 percent of Associate degree holders and 67 percent of Bachelor degree holders have transcripts from multiple institutions. The intersection of these trends has exposed systemic problems and the challenges that students—and especially students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds—face when they attempt to move those credits between postsecondary institutions.

In November 2022, Ithaka S+R introduced Holistic Credit Mobility as a framework for making sense of contemporary student mobility and devising solutions that center the success of mobile students with multiple forms and sources of validated learning. This next phase of the work will allow us to document how holistic credit mobility supports are being successfully deployed, collaborate with Complete College America to work directly with a cohort of systems or institutional consortia seeking to improve credit mobility through one or more of these supports and generate an actionable holistic credit mobility playbook with research and strategies that can help institutions overcome the challenges listed above.

We are excited to work with Complete College America, a bold national advocate and agent for systems change to dramatically increase college completion rates and close institutional performance gaps. CCA works with states, systems, institutions, and partners to scale highly effective structural reforms and promote policies that improve student success.

Later this year, we will select 10-12 system and institutional consortia to form a cohort dedicated to advancing holistic credit mobility in concrete and impactful ways. The cohort will meet regularly virtually over 12 months to evaluate their current practices, policies, and technologies; identify strategies for improvement; learn from leading national experts; engage with counterparts at other institutions and systems who are also addressing these challenges; and devise an action plan for the ongoing efforts to improve credit mobility for their students. Details about how systems and consortia of institutions can apply to be a part of the holistic credit mobility cohort will be released later this summer, but anyone interested in expressing an early interest can send an email to Pooja Patel at pooja.patel@ithaka.org.