CUNY Tool Improves Credit Transfer

Community colleges are often an entry point to higher education for first-generation and low-income students. But credit loss and credit inefficiency can derail students’ progress toward transferring to a four-year institution, adding extra courses, time and cost on the path to a bachelor’s degree.

To address this, the City University of New York created Transfer Explorer, or T-REX, a public-facing tool that shows how courses transfer across the system’s 20 undergraduate colleges and which apply to specific degree requirements. Launched in 2020, the tool is designed for students, advisers and faculty and aims to reduce fragmented information and inconsistent advising.

New research suggests the tool is making a difference. A report from Ithaka S+R analyzed data for nearly 30,000 first-time transfer students who transferred between fall 2020 and spring 2025. While T-REX use was not consistently linked to students transferring more courses over all, the report shows that students who used the tool were able to apply more of their credits toward nonelective degree requirements, including major, minor and general education requirements.

The findings suggest T-REX’s value lies less in increasing how many credits students transfer than in improving how those credits count—an outcome researchers say can help students maintain momentum toward a degree.

Martin Kurzweil, managing director of Ithaka S+R, said the findings highlight the way clear, timely and actionable information about how prior learning applies to degree requirements can shape student decision-making.

“T-REX is unusual in that it provides accurate and up-to-date information not just about transferability—how credits are translated when a student transfers to a CUNY school—but also applicability, or how those credits count toward requirements,” Kurzweil said. “T-REX is associated with the kind of transfer outcome we would hope for from a resource like that.”

In its first three years, the platform drew more than 240,000 unique users, according to the report. Kurzweil said that number has since more than doubled to over 500,000.

“[T-REX] is a really great proof point that providing transparency to people who need key information to transfer can help them make better plans and see the benefits when they do,” Kurzweil said.

Navigating transfer complexity: The report frames transfer not only as a policy and administrative challenge, but also as an information problem, noting that students often navigate unclear advising, inconsistent course numbering and limited transparency about how courses apply to degree requirements.

That makes successful navigation dependent on “social know-how,” which can advantage those with greater access to guidance and insider knowledge, the report said. Such gaps can compound existing inequities, particularly for students of color and those from low-income backgrounds who rely heavily on the community college pathway.

David Wutchiett, a data scientist at CUNY, said that while systemwide policies require courses to transfer between colleges, that doesn’t guarantee those credits will count toward degree requirements beyond general electives.

“You can have a policy that says the courses will transfer, but the utility of those courses could vary, especially if so many of the courses transfer as general electives,” Wutchiett said. “That could lead to students accumulating too many electives and needing to start at the very beginning of their major requirements after they transfer.”

“Within the context of [T-REX], that particular benefit—applying credits toward degree requirements—is important and builds off of the more universal policy of requiring that courses transfer,” he added.

Alex Monday, a researcher at Ithaka S+R, said T-REX usage was more common among “higher-resourced students,” including those who used the tool in partnership with academic advisers.

But Kurzweil noted that usage is likely to broaden as CUNY’s ASAP program incorporates T-REX into its advising model.

“Those students are, in many cases, not particularly well resourced, but T-REX is becoming a part of their advising through their associate degree education,” Kurzweil said. “Given that, we expect to be able to look at that in much greater depth in the future, and the platform will be used more widely going forward.”

The bigger picture: Kurzweil said T-REX is complementary to other programs that facilitate transfer, and no single intervention is sufficient on its own to address existing transfer challenges. He added that “holistic credit mobility” is important for institutions and policymakers to consider when they think about a student’s transfer journey.

Future research should examine T-REX usage in relation to longer-term outcomes such as graduation, he said.

Wutchiett said the development of T-REX helped make institutional performance and program alignment more visible across colleges.

“It gave the informational tools to administrators to be able to provide equivalencies that were more consistent with what other institutions were offering, or to recognize where a program was not in alignment with a common feeder school, or to recognize where there was a mistake in how they were coding the program requirements into the degree-audit system,” Wutchiett said. “Those issues could be addressed because they became visible and transparent.”

Get more content like this directly to your inbox. Subscribe here.