Students earn academic credit and acquire college-level learning from many sources—dual enrollment while in high school, standardized exams, work experience, military experience, and attendance at multiple colleges—throughout their education. However, far too often students encounter roadblocks and detours when trying to move their learning to and between higher education institutions to earn a college degree. Losing earned credits wastes students’ time, money, and momentum, and credit loss disproportionately affects students who are older, low-income, or first-generation.
At Ithaka S+R we’re working with our partners to improve the transfer process by conducting critical research and creating new tools that enable students to chart their higher education journey.
Holistic Credit Mobility
In order to better support students to gain credit for validated learning, we developed a framework for understanding student mobility and devising solutions that center student success, with support from Ascendium Education Group.
In the latest multi-faceted project in this area, Ithaka S+R and Complete College America are collaborating to surface new insights and concrete steps to advance policies, technology, and practices that promote a student-centered, holistic approach to credit mobility.
- National Holistic Credit Mobility Acceleration Cohort: Announcing 11 Members
- Holistic Credit Mobility Strategies in Action: A Case Study Report on State, System, and Institutional Efforts to Smooth the Path to a College Degree for Mobile Students
- Improving Holistic Credit Mobility to Help Adult Learners Succeed: A New RFP from Ithaka S+R and Complete College America
- Next Steps in Student Mobility: Ithaka S+R and Complete College America Partner to Support Student Success through Holistic Credit Mobility Policies, Practices, and Technologies
- Holistic Credit Mobility: Centering Learning in Credential Completion
Transfer Explorer
To help address the many challenges college students face when they attempt to transfer credits and learning they have earned, Ithaka S+R has launched a new, public, non-profit, national credit mobility website—Transfer Explorer. Currently in its beta release, Transfer Explorer will expand in 2025 to contain data from a growing number of institutions across four states, thanks to collaborations with the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system, the City University of New York, the South Carolina Commission on Higher Education, and the Washington Student Achievement Council.
Unique among similar services, the site shows how credits earned elsewhere transfer and apply toward degree programs at the multiple destination colleges and universities featured on the site. The funding for this new website is provided through the generous support of philanthropic foundations including Ascendium Education Group, the Gates Foundation, ECMC Foundation, and The Ichigo Foundation. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect positions or policies of the funders.
- Visit Transfer Explorer beta
- Providing Credit Transfer Visibility to Improve Credit Mobility: Ithaka S+R’s ‘Universal Transfer Explorer’ Launching in Three States in 2024
CUNY Transfer Explorer
Since June 2019, we’ve partnered with The City University of New York (CUNY) to streamline the information, advising, and administrative processes around how credits—earned anywhere in the CUNY system, at other colleges and universities, and through dual enrollment or workforce training—transfer and count towards a degree at each CUNY institution.
To empower students to make informed decisions on the path towards their degrees, we collaborated to develop CUNY Transfer Explorer, or CUNY T-Rex, a public platform that hosts accessible, up-to-date information on how credits will transfer.
- Building a Successful Credit Mobility Platform: Lesson Learned from CUNY Transfer Explorer
- Transfer Credit Information at Your Fingertips: Preliminary Findings on Use and Implementation of CUNY Transfer Explorer
- CUNY and Ithaka S+R Launch New Functionality in CUNY Transfer Explorer
- Opening the Black Box of Credit Transfer to Everyone
- Archiving Degree Audit Data to Measure and Reduce Lost Transfer Credit
- Ithaka S+R to Expand Transfer Improvement Efforts with CUNY
- Streamlining Transfer for CUNY Students in the Bronx
- A New Resource to Help CUNY Students Transfer Smarter
- Improving Articulation of Transfer Credit at CUNY
CUNY Transfer Explorer is a product of the Articulation of Credit Transfer project, a collaboration between CUNY, Lehman College, and Ithaka S+R. CUNY Transfer Explorer was created with funding from The Heckscher Foundation for Children and has received additional support from Ascendium Education Group, the Carroll and Milton Petrie Foundation, ECMC Foundation, The Ichigo Foundation, and CUNY. CUNY Transfer Explorer builds on the pioneering work of Queens College professor emeritus Christopher Vickery.
Building Transfer Pathways
Effective transfer pathways are crucial for an increasingly mobile student population and can also help four-year colleges and universities meet their enrollment goals. We’ve undertaken several projects to provide practical, research-based guidance to leaders of both community colleges and four-year colleges who want to improve transfer pathways and better support transfer students.
- Assessing the Effectiveness of Transfer Associate Degrees in Washington
- The Trouble with Transfer for Student Veterans
- Right in Your Backyard: Expanding Local Community College Transfer Pathways to High-Graduation-Rate Institutions
- Transfer Pathways to Independent Colleges
- Driving Liberal Arts Transfer Pathways
- A “How To” Guide to Effective Transfer Pathways
Currently, Ithaka S+R is serving as an independent evaluator of the Transfer Pathways to the Liberal Arts initiative, supported by Teagle Foundation and Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, which provides funding to state and regional associations to pursue consortium-level pathways from community colleges to private liberal arts colleges.