Tension Between Access, Quality in Credit Transfer (column)

In what was little more than an aside in my last column about the potential desirability of taking a more metropolitan or regional approach to coordinating higher education, I mentioned learning mobility (a broader term for transfer of credit) as one of several issues on which colleges should cooperate more and differentiate less on behalf of learners.

On my LinkedIn post about the column, the sage higher ed economist David Feldman zeroed in on that issue and warned that I might be oversimplifying the problem.

“Credit portability is a tough issue,” Feldman wrote. “We do not want a race to the bottom in which the institutions that pump out credits with little evidence of student learning dictate the curriculum at more conscientious institutions.” He added a counterpoint: “I know it goes both ways. We do not want institutions refusing perfectly good transfer credits in order to pump up course demand (and revenue) from their students.”

Two days later, a Washington Post article framed the tension inherent in Feldman’s comment in an eye-catching way. Todd Wallack’s piece, “For less than $100, I clicked my way toward a college degree in days,” documented how he expended little effort in breezing through five courses from the online platform Sophia Learning in a matter of hours—courses that could transfer to dozens of colleges and universities and likely be counted toward a degree.

Soon after, the political scientist Kyle Saunders, in a post on his Sacred Cow BBQ Substack that I can’t fully do justice to here, seized on the Post piece to argue that Wallack’s shortcut was a feature, not a bug, of our evolving postsecondary ecosystem.

For years, Saunders writes, learners have been able to accumulate meaningful credit for prior learning through certification exams like CLEP, and increasingly from unaccredited platforms like Sophia, through a process that involves credible intermediaries like the American Council on Education and the nation’s accreditors.

Yet at “no point in that chain,” he adds, “does anyone whose job it is to certify learning actually certify that learning happened.”

What makes the Post article especially timely and worrisome, Saunders suggests, are the changes that the Trump administration is poised to make in its unfolding process to develop new federal rules governing “accreditation, innovation and modernization,” which he describes as being a “user manual for what [the Post reporter] just did.”

Saunders wrote that the rules, which will take effect unless the almost inevitable legal challenges succeed, will formally “bless and scale” the credit-recognition machinery that he (and other critics like Hollis Robbins) bemoan by more or less requiring colleges to apply undergraduate academic credit from other accredited institutions toward general education requirements, unless they provide a specific written rationale for rejecting it.

The result, as Saunders calls it in the title of his post: the “sanctioned hack of higher education.”

He and others aren’t wrong to be worried about the potential for, in Feldman’s words, a “race to the bottom” in which too-easy recognition of credit can result in the awarding of unearned credentials. But given the inevitable tension between access and quality—which has existed for as long as education has—I humbly suggest that the greater risk comes in exclusion.

I won’t rehash here all the data and arguments about the financial and time costs to individual learners and to society as a whole of policies that either reject outright, or fail to apply toward degree requirements, academic credit from formal courses or other learning experiences. (Here and here and here are a sampling if you want to read more.)

Here’s my tl;dr summary of the key points:

• Too many learners invest their time and money in formal courses and other academic experiences that are later deemed to be not worthy of recognition by another institution, driving up the costs of their education and delaying their entry into work or further study. This is bad for learners and puts the lie to the rhetoric that we are “student-centered.”
• Many decisions to reject academic credit can be attributed to a form of what I call institutional exceptionalism, or belief in the uniqueness or superiority of what a particular college or university does: the snobby view that there’s no way that that course at a community college (let alone an online institution) can possibly be as rigorous or as well-taught as our course taught by our brilliant faculty. This is despite that fact that bad, and poorly taught, courses exist at Harvard, too.
• As is often the case in higher ed, the incentive and reward structures are such that institutions are often making rational (if self-interested) decisions when they reject academic credits that learners earn at other institutions or refuse to apply them toward a degree, because requiring students to retake courses generates tuition revenue and benefits academic departments that are rewarded based on how many credit hours they generate.

So if it’s true both that too many students lose out because they don’t get credit for learning they’ve earned, and that lowering the bar too much could result in a lot of abuse and further watering down of the meaning of credentials, how do we reconcile that tension?

For most of the smart people I listen to in this space, the answer lies not in federal rules requiring institutions to accept credits (which lack nuance and trample on institutional autonomy more than is ideal) but in much greater transparency about the underlying nature of the courses and credits in question to give colleges more clarity about and, where appropriate, confidence in the quality of that prior learning.

That’s why the Learning Evaluation and Recognition for the Next Generation Commission, a joint project of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers and Sova’s Beyond Transfer initiative, prioritizes making much more and better information publicly available about students’ learning experiences.

Syllabi are wholly inadequate, says Melanie Gottlieb, AACRAO’s executive director. “If we’re truly going to assess prior learning experiences, we need to look deeper into what happened in the classroom. We need information about the knowledge, skills and domains that the experience covered, some information about the assessments, and some kind of quality marker,” she says.

“We’re still going to have to make judgments, but without more granular information, we’re not going to be able to make the kinds of nuanced decisions that we’re being asked to consider.”

My colleague Martin Kurzweil, managing director of Ithaka S+R, doesn’t believe federal mandates are the best way to attack this problem but sees promise in one aspect of the Trump administration’s emerging rules: the requirement that institutions document every inbound credit and provide a rationale for those they reject.

He notes that when the City University of New York system undertook a major initiative to improve its historically fragmented credit system, “one of the early policy changes that set them on a better trajectory was a requirement that every credit earned at CUNY had to count for something, which meant that they had to document everything, set rules for everything.”

Making those data “public and transparent and legible,” Kurzweil says, “made it very easy to see that one four-year university in the system was giving only elective credit for the same community college course that another university was awarding credit toward the major.” That process laid the groundwork for the Transfer Explorer tool that has improved credit mobility within CUNY, and that Ithaka S+R is beginning to roll out nationally.

“Transparency around not only transferability of academic credit but applicability toward the major, across every institution combination, would empower students and advisers to vote with their feet,” Kurzweil says.

The conversation around credit transfer/learning mobility is way more complicated than I’ve been able to explore in this short column, and the discussion about the tension between access and quality is infinitely more complex than that, especially amid the explosion of nondegree credentials of uncertain value.

We’ve never been good at really understanding how much learning is happening in a given course, let alone an entire course of study. If I have a plea, it’s that we not revert to our stand-by assumptions that the oldest and most traditional experiences are inevitably best, that new and different (and technologically delivered) is crap, and that learning that we personally play a role in delivering or enabling is superior.

Students deserve better.