Welcome to year four of the “Beyond Transfer” blog on Inside Higher Ed. We’re humbled by and thankful for the lively and passionate community this has become. We continue to be impressed with the levels of readership, the exemplary work that various authors describe, the connections that are made as people respond to one another’s work and the dedication to students that jumps off the page. We begin 2025 feeling truly grateful to all those working hard every day to ensure fair treatment of students and their learning. Thank you for all you do.
Each year, we kick off the “Beyond Transfer” blog with some reflections on what we’ve learned from you and all our partners on the ground and what that means for the year ahead. We are excited to welcome Sova’s new partner Marty Alvarado to this endeavor. Marty has a long history of leading impactful transfer and learning mobility work, and while she’s new to Sova, her insights have long guided our work.
In 2024, Sova’s transfer and learning mobility team was far-flung and working deeply in many contexts. As a result, we begin 2025 midstride on a variety of fronts:
- In states: The Sova team is embedded in truly consequential transfer and learning mobility work in several states. This hard, on-the-ground work includes facilitating state-level, cross-sector leadership tables, providing technical assistance for institutional collaborations, supporting implementation of legislatively mandated reforms and serving as a thought partner to state agencies and system offices in diverse political and governance contexts.
- In partnerships: In 2024, we joined forces with key organizations to amplify impacts and advance the field, including the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, Public Agenda, Educate Texas, the National Institute for the Study of Transfer Students, Middle States Commission on Higher Education, Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, WASC Senior College and University Commission and more.
- In national groups: Sova continues to facilitate the Beyond Transfer Policy Advisory Board and in 2024 also launched in collaboration with AACRAO the new national Learning Evaluation and Recognition for the Next Generation Commission.
- In cross-sector regional collaborations: We’re embedded with P-20 collaborations in a few states, focused on important workforce and community needs such as system-to-system applicability of credit and data interoperability. We’re also moving the needle on mapping and implementing pathways for dual-enrollment students that meet high school graduation requirements, ensure students complete an associate degree and meet the transfer requirements of the bachelor’s programs in the region.
- In technology: Sova is also partnering with the American Association of Community Colleges; Zachary Pardos, associate professor of education and director of the University of California at Berkeley’s Computational Approaches to Human Learning research lab; and the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities to build the AI Transfer and Articulation Infrastructure Network. ATAIN aims to create a network of institutions nationwide using a software platform called CourseWise that will generate AI-informed course equivalencies and provide individualized program mapping and course selection guidance for students.
The new year is a time when people reflect on the year that passed and make commitments for the year ahead. This year, we thought we’d play on that theme by sharing some reflections on the past year and what that means for our team’s commitments in the year ahead.
You may have heard that Merriam-Webster’s 2024 Word of the Year was “polarization,” which Merriam-Webster defined as “division into two sharply distinct opposites; especially, a state in which the opinions, beliefs or interests of a group or society no longer range along a continuum but become concentrated at opposing extremes.” For anyone who lived through the 2024 U.S. presidential election, the selection of this word of the year probably comes as no surprise.
This led us to reflect on a hard lesson we have learned through our transfer and learning mobility work, which is that this, too, is a space that can quickly lead to polarization. So often, we hear blame placed on receiving institutions for not taking enough credits or on sending institutions for not preparing students well enough. We see examples of administration pitted against faculty for control over decision-making related to transfer credits. We even see the needs of transfer students held up against the needs of students who started and stayed at an institution. Sound familiar?
So our first commitment for 2025 is to practice the art of depolarization. What do we mean by that? In many ways, this feels like a recommitment to values we already hold, but (being human) sometimes don’t fully live up to. We will welcome hard conversations. We will actively listen, with the goal of building understanding and empathy. We will begin hard conversations with a reminder to honor the perspectives and expertise of all present. We will focus on the human dimensions of change, which includes recognizing that people bring the beauty of their identities and experiences to the work alongside fear of loss, discomfort with conflict and differing styles. We will actively find ways to include all participants. We will transparently document differing perspectives. We will avoid overgeneralizations and stereotypes. We will remember that we work with educators who care about students and welcome being invited into collaborative problem-solving. And when we fall short of these recommitments, we will be open to others holding us accountable.
Another commitment we have for 2025 is the work of finding and expanding the common ground. This too flows from an interest in depolarization and our shared conviction that common ground exists but can be easily drowned out amid the din of partisan hostility.
We know that transfer touches many learners—in fact, likely more learners than we previously thought. New data from a survey of a nationally representative sample of Americans, conducted in a partnership between Public Agenda and Sova for “Beyond Transfer,” found that four in 10 respondents tried to transfer some type of credit toward earning an associate degree, bachelor’s degree or certificate. Moreover, those respondents shared that their credit transfer journeys took many forms, including seeking credit transfer for military experience, work-based learning and dual-credit courses in high school. Despite their different journeys, many shared the common experience of credit loss, with 58 percent of respondents indicating they had lost some number of credits when transferring. These data points demonstrate there is a large and diverse population of mobile learners that we should bring into the conversation to build awareness of the high incidence of transfer and generate support for policy action.
While there are many contentious issues in higher education—including how to improve affordability and how to address ballooning student loan debt—transfer is an area with bipartisan support that, if we can improve, can generate downstream improvements in other areas, such as completion and affordability.
In the same Public Agenda survey, respondents of all political backgrounds expressed strong support for a variety of policy ideas intended to improve credit transfer. Credit mobility and transfer might well be an issue around which Republicans, Democrats and Independents prove they are capable of agreement and joint action. Improving transfer stands to offer a triple bottom line for learners, institutions and taxpayers:
- For learners: Recognizing more of their hard-earned credit is the fair thing to do, and research makes clear it will also advance their success by increasing retention and shortening time and cost to completion.
- For institutions: Public appetite for transparency and accountability clearly cuts across political identities, and institutions would be well served by paying attention to this growing appetite and its relationship to the ongoing decline of public confidence in the value of higher education.
- For taxpayers: Maximizing the credits earned for students will ensure taxpayer dollars are used to best effect.
As we dive into 2025, we’ll keep working to dial down the finger-pointing and blaming, cut across silos and divides of our own making, and expand the common ground that already exists on transfer. We hope you’ll join us in finding ways to come together across multiple fronts—within institutions and systems, with government and policymakers at all levels, with accreditors and associations—to serve our students. They deserve it.
Want to share your commitments for 2025? Please send your thoughts to [email protected] by Feb. 15. We will synthesize your thoughts and reflect them in an upcoming post.