80% of community college students intend to transfer to earn their Bachelor’s degree. Only 16% accomplish that goal. Why? To discuss the challenges of transfer and share how institutions can become more transfer friendly, we are joined by Tania LaViolet, Director of Research & Innovation at The Aspen Institute. She shares strategies from The Transfer Playbook 2.0 and discusses how we can assist learners in navigating their transfer pathway.
To access The Transfer Playbook 2.0 in its entirety, click here – https://highered.aspeninstitute.org/playbooks/transfer-playbook-20-practical-guide-achieving-excellence-transfer-and-bachelors
Matt Sterenberg (00:00.94)
All right, Tania, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today.
Tania LaViolet (00:05.561)
I’m Matt, thanks for having me.
Matt Sterenberg (00:07.854)
So we are talking about the transfer playbook 2.0, which came out somewhat recently. Set the table for us, Tania. What is the transfer landscape like? Like what are we actually trying to solve for? What are some of the challenges? Why is the transfer playbook a critical document for institutions to care about?
Tania LaViolet (00:30.489)
Sure. Well, let me start with a little bit of data, Matt. So I’m a data nerd. I always like to start with graphs. I don’t have those here, but hopefully I can share a few data points that will really just stick with you. So nationally, year after year, surveys demonstrate that about 80 % of incoming community college students indicate an interest in a bachelor’s degree. Then when we look six years out after entry,
only 16%, one six, that’s not a typo, 16 % of those entering students will attain a bachelor’s degree. And so, you know, there’s this gulf between what students aspire to and what they’re accomplishing. And when we look at the scale of that gap between student aspirations and their outcomes, we’ve got to ask, you know, what,
what systems are failing these students? Because the evidence points to it’s not the students that aren’t doing enough to navigate the systems. It’s the systems are overly complex and not very student-centered. And they’ve been that way for years because the data have also not really budged. The outcomes haven’t really budged over the last decade. So that’s the challenge that we’re presented with. 80 % who
indicating interest who want a bachelor’s degree and 16 % who eventually do. And so the transfer playbook really tries to address that gap by providing concrete strategies and tactics that college leaders and practitioners can put into place, both as their individual institutions and in partnerships between community colleges and universities.
Matt Sterenberg (03:33.878)
One of the things I really like about the transfer playbook and the work that you and others have done at the Aspen Institute, the community college research center is to take a step back and not just think about transfer as this one event or as this, it’s just courses and credits. Like what can be so complex about that? Why is it, why is this a barrier for students? And you really start to think about
the ecosystem as a whole, you think about student motivation, all the different supports, because you highlighted the 80 % that want to go on to get a bachelor’s degree. And it’s not necessarily that they just, oh, I couldn’t figure out how to send my transcript and therefore I didn’t transfer. It’s much bigger than that, isn’t it?
Tania LaViolet (04:22.197)
Exactly. And I think that’s one of the main findings from the transfer playbook is that, you know, these really strong partnerships aren’t focused on just one thing. They’re not just focused on credit articulation or recruitment of transfer students. They’re really looking at end to end redesign of the full transfer student experience, which starts, you know, sometimes before a student enters community college.
all the way through to graduating with a bachelor’s degree. And they’re interrogating at every step of that experience, what are some of the barriers and challenges that we might be putting in front of students and asking, how can we take away those barriers? How can we create these initiatives, programs, these models that
address all of those challenges in a holistic way so that the full transfer student experience is a positive one. And that’s how they’ve been able to achieve these much stronger overall outcomes and stronger outcomes for students that have historically had the least opportunity in higher education.
Matt Sterenberg (05:33.196)
And I’m thinking about the student too who he enrolls in community college, let’s say, and he’s one of the 80%. He’s thinking, I’m going to go get a bachelor’s degree. Well, the courses that he takes, the experience he’s looking for at community college, if I am planning on transferring to a four year to get my bachelor’s, I’m going to make certain decisions, right?
And if I somehow don’t end up transferring, know, like, what does that say about the experience that I have at the community college, right? Like I didn’t come in purely to get an associates, let’s say. And so, you know, what am I left with when I’m planning on transferring? I don’t end up doing it. Now what am I left with? Like my, all the selections I made at the community college of what courses I needed to take.
we’re in service of something that I never ended up pursuing. It’s like you’re going on this long road trip. You’re like, we’re packing everything up. We were planning everything. And then you’re like, actually, we’re not going to get there. We’ve got all this stuff packed in the car that we didn’t end up using or we didn’t plan accordingly. I just think that’s a really interesting thing as you think about just the life of a student. They’re not able to fulfill the vision that they had and you know.
What courses and credits do they have? Were they even able to get an associate’s even though they wanted to pursue a bachelor’s?
Tania LaViolet (07:03.747)
Right. Well, there’s a lot to unpack there, Matt. But I just want to share that that story that you’ve depicted is one that I think too many students can relate to. So, you you’re saying what are they left with? Well, you know,
Matt Sterenberg (07:08.564)
I know, sorry to throw so much at you.
Tania LaViolet (07:26.297)
Every year there are about 400,000 students who graduate with an associate degree that is oriented toward transfer, an associate degree of liberal arts. And those associate degrees, depending on where you live, have very marginal labor market value if you do not get a bachelor’s degree subsequently. And so when we look at those 400,000, there’s hundreds of thousands of students, right, who get that associate degree every year,
state level data and research indicate that probably about 30 to 50 % of those graduates go on to transfer. So these are not just college students, they are college graduates who get an associate degree that is oriented toward transfer but then do not go on to transfer. And we know that the labor market value of those degrees is not fully realized without getting the bachelor’s degree and
When you unpack that journey that you were depicting, there are so many hurdles, big ones and also little ones, know, by a thousand paper cuts. But what that amounts to is hundreds of thousands of students that have done the work, that have proven that they have the talent to be a college graduate, but aren’t able to go through the full transfer process.
And again, I think what the playbook does is it turns the question to institutional leaders and practitioners and asks why that is and what can we do about it. And so just to revisit that story that you depicted, I think it’s one that’s not so uncommon where a student enters into community college, maybe with or without a good sense of where they want to go in terms of their major. They know that they
want to get a bachelor’s degree, they know that they want to have good workforce outcomes, good earnings after their higher education, but may need a little bit of help determining what their path is. And what is really challenging across the nation is trying to find that path and then understanding what that path means in terms of the courses that you need to take that will eventually transfer.
Tania LaViolet (09:51.255)
to a four-year institution and apply to your degree. And it’s so much harder than it needs to be. Like literally on college websites, there are articulation agreements, legal documents written in legalese that are uploaded in PDFs to their website, cast as student resources for figuring out how to transfer. So that wasn’t really working for students before, it’s not working for students now.
What I love about the playbook exemplars is they give some hope for what it could look like moving forward. And the last point I want to make about the story that you shared is that, again, when student aspirations and their outcomes don’t meet, and they are trying, and they are doing everything they can to make it work, when you look at the distrust in higher education right now, this is one of the sources of it. We’ve billed transfer as this way to support a more affordable path to a bachelor’s degree.
But we haven’t laid the systems in place by and large across the country to realize those aspirations.
Matt Sterenberg (10:58.956)
Yeah, I love that you brought up articulation agreements because I think that’s the default for a lot of people. Be like, have articulation agreements. We have it mapped, you know, and it’s like, it’s necessary, but not sufficient, right? Because it takes like it’s building the roads, but it’s not really helping people navigate them. Right. We need a, like a compass, like the infrastructure is built, but it’s like, how do we actually help people get there? and so I think that’s the default for a lot of people.
No, we work with our four-year partner or two-year partner, and we have these agreements in place. And what it doesn’t acknowledge is, OK, well, this course at your community college will transfer to this. You’ll get credit for this course at your four-year. But what if I’m a learner and I can’t take that class this semester? can’t. I’m working, or it’s not available, or the section is full. Now what do I do?
So I think it just like you step back and you go like, what are the actual pathways? What are the actual challenges in terms of like navigating, the roads that we’ve set up of, of courses in credit. like, that’s why I really think the transfer playbook is all about. It’s not just about articulation. How do we think about being transfer friendly to be pro transfer to really set up the ecosystem? And I will link to.
the transfer playbook in the episode description and we’ll make sure to share it out. But you lay out three phenomenal strategies and I want to go through each one. The first one is prioritize transfer at the executive level. Tell me a little bit more about that.
Tania LaViolet (12:40.043)
Yeah, sure. So again, just pointing back to the data, the gap between student aspirations and outcomes indicates that we’ve got to do something big. We’ve got to make big moves. These little incremental changes, they’re important and there’s a place for them. But the data signal that we’ve got to do something bigger and that we’ve got to achieve some systemic level change at scale.
And in order to accomplish that, in most cases, you’ve got to have your presidents, your cabinet involved in the reforms in order to achieve that level of systemic change, in order to achieve that level of scale. And furthermore, it’s important to have that buy-in and support for sustainability. What we found in our research is that there are
plenty of transfer practitioners out there across the nation that are driving the ship and they are achieving strong outcomes. But guess what? They’re really talented individuals that move on. And when those individuals move on, their work kind of comes to a standstill. And that’s not great for students. So what we saw at the exemplars that we’ve profiled in the playbook is that
from the president to the provost to other cabinet leaders and then working through the organization, the institution, all the way to student facing professionals, right? At both the community college and the four-year institution in partnership. That was the kind of dedicated leadership across both institutions and in partnership that was required to get to these sustainable.
and scalable solutions, what we call end-to-end redesign of the transfer student experience. And so that’s why it’s important to have that executive level leadership. And so we lay out in the playbook what that means, right? What does it mean for a president to prioritize transfer? Yes, one component of that is
Tania LaViolet (14:57.365)
as talking about it and making it visible. But the other component of that is following up with that visibility with real resources, both in terms of financial resources, but also the time for your institutional leaders and practitioners to dedicate to transfer and improving transfer partnerships. And then again, dedicating the resources and time to building the systems that are going to outlast any
individual that is running the transfer initiatives or programs. And that’s what it really came down to. And so, you know, it sounds really simple, but unfortunately, that’s not what we see at most partnerships.
Matt Sterenberg (15:45.912)
Well, I think about the incentives. Like how can we align the incentives of our institution or our system? Because that’s ultimately, if you’re gonna get executive level buy-in or if your community college president is gonna buy into this, how do I pitch it to her? Right? How do I say we need to care about this? Because there’s many different priorities.
many different things you could spend your time on as a piece of the leadership team at a community college. Like, why should I care about transfer? How do we align the incentives? How do we make it make sense for them and get them to really care about it? Have you seen any evidence of this? Have you seen states try to incentivize, you know, completion or transfer versus just enrollment? You know, how have you seen this play out? Or if you have any examples, I would love to hear them.
Tania LaViolet (16:30.221)
Yeah.
Tania LaViolet (16:42.051)
Sure. So I think that there’s some institutional incentives and I think there are some state incentives. So let’s start with the institutional. And I think this really boils down to kind of institutional mission. So for both community colleges and for four-year institutions, when transfer is working well, it can be a real talent development pipeline for your region to meet workforce needs.
There’s shortages of teachers, there’s shortages of nurses. Community colleges and four-year institutions working together can serve local students who are likely to stay local and serve their communities in these different workforce capacities. So that’s one, talent development for your local communities.
That’s part of your mission as a community college, as a regional public institution. so transfer can help meet that. I’d say second is an enrollment priority. I think we’ve seen the declines and there’s some recovery from the pandemic years in terms of enrollment, but there’s still the demographic cliff that enrollment professionals and college leaders across the country are concerned about.
If we’re able to lean into community college transfer and make it more efficient, right, so that students are being retained and completing their associate degrees at community college at higher rates, and then transferring to four-year institutions at higher rates and completing their degrees at higher rates, that’s a way to, a big way to help solve the enrollment challenges that are present and also coming down the pike.
Matt Sterenberg (18:28.162)
yeah, for a four year, think about it. You just highlighted the numbers at the top. 80 % want to attend your institution, let’s say, right? Only 16 % do for a four year. The incentives are clear. Like we want, like we’re missing out on people that at one point thought they would be here and they haven’t arrived.
Tania LaViolet (18:36.824)
Yes.
Tania LaViolet (18:47.605)
Exactly, exactly. And I think that that’s, you know, these are hundreds of thousands of students, right, Matt? And so that’s enough to offset a lot of the challenges from the demographic cliff that are impending. And the other thing that I’ll say is that, you know, I think there’s a bit of a short-termism problem, right? There are some, you know, enrollment leaders in the four-year space that are like, well, why
why not enroll these students at the four-year institution to begin with? And I would say, you know, for some students, that might be the better path for them to start directly at the four-year institution. But we can’t ignore what students are telling us by enrolling in community college. They’re enrolling in community college because that’s the right fit for them. They can afford it. In many cases, they’re choosing that pathway because…
of the lower tuition rates in community college. They’re choosing it because it’s more flexible to accommodate their lives. Many of them are parenting students, are working in the community college setting, is more amenable to their outside of the classroom lives. Or, you know, it’s just, they’re local. They’re serving their local communities and it’s more convenient for students. And so for a large number of students, starting at a four-year institution was never going to be their first option.
And so this is an untapped market for four-year institutions to increase their enrollments. And so again, just looking at the data, it’s not a hard case to make that this should be a priority for sustainability of your institution and both enrollment and financial viability later down the line.
Matt Sterenberg (20:37.9)
Yeah. And in Michigan, where I live, we have a way for community college to be free. Right. And so it’s like, okay. you know, what, how do we actually take advantage of this great thing so that it’s actually worth something and not just this free thing that we’re doing, how do we actually make it valuable and useful? need to make sure that people are getting to where they want to go. So the second strategy is align program pathways and high quality instruction to promote timely.
bachelor’s completion. Aligning program pathways, what do you mean by that?
Tania LaViolet (21:14.199)
Yeah, so I want to underscore pathway here. think, know, historically when we think about articulation, we’re thinking about course to course articulation, which I think can be part of pathways. what we’re really interested in here is what does it take to start in community college and transfer to a four-year institution and graduate without excess credits and to be able to do that within a major in a timely manner?
And the tool that we found schools were using to get to this programmatic alignment were what we’re calling these four-year maps. So what we mean by four-year maps are the courses that a student would need to take in community college and a four-year institution.
that they can conceivably complete in the equivalent of four years. We know that the vast majority of community college students are attending part-time, but the idea of a four-year math gives you really strict bounds for what is acceptable in terms of a pathway, in terms of the credits that students have to be taking, the courses that they have to be taking, and the time that they would need to take in order to complete that pathway. So it really is, it’s a benchmark that
community colleges and four-year institutions can work to board this idea of a four-year equivalent map to design their pathways. Now, when we get underneath that, just having a map with courses that equate to four years of coursework, it’s not enough. Not all maps are created equal. And what we found from the exemplars is that
What they were doing was they were aligning within majors to make sure that students were prepared as juniors entering a major at the four-year institution. So that means that they were taking enough major-specific coursework. So if I’m a biology major, I’m taking four, six biology courses while I’m in community college so that when I get to my four-year university, I am as prepared within my major as a student who would have started at that four-year institution.
Tania LaViolet (23:30.645)
And while it sounds simple, when we look at other four-year maps that other partnerships have developed, that’s not the case. Students aren’t taking enough major-specific coursework in community colleges. And sometimes there’s good reason for that, but sometimes it’s just a matter of a lack of communication and coordination between the community colleges and the four-year institutions. And so in order to get to these four-year maps,
what we saw colleges doing is coming together, bringing their faculty across discipline from the community college and the four-year institution together to map out these pathways, setting a benchmark, saying, okay, we want these pathways to be no more than the equivalent of four years, right? And then you map it out in your discipline to figure out how a student is going to be, what coursework a student needs to be able to complete to be.
prepared in their major and graduate on time. And what that does with these convenings between faculty is that it doesn’t just touch on whether or not a course, quote unquote, articulates. So like has the same curriculum. What it does is it invites conversation about instruction and says, well, how are you teaching this? What does this look like for you? What does this lab look like for your students?
That allows for deeper conversations about aligning instruction so students are learning what they need to learn in their coursework to be prepared to be thriving in their majors at both the community college and the university level. So there’s a lot in there. So it’s not just articulation that we’re getting at here. And I want to be very clear about that.
Matt Sterenberg (25:17.688)
Well, you hit the term excess credits I thought was worth double clicking on here because I think it is like to your point, I’m going to enroll in community college. I’ll take a bunch of classes and that’ll shorten my time at a four year institution. Well, just because it transfers doesn’t mean it’s actually going to shorten your time to degree completion, right? You do all of your gen eds and then you’re like,
Now I’m really gonna start taking biology classes at the four year. Turns out I have to take them in a certain sequence. So I spent maybe two years at a community college, but it only saves me one year. And actually when I get to on campus at the four year, it’s like, man, am I prepared for these classes? And so I like your approach because it’s also thinking about ultimately like retention and student success when they get there. Like maybe we can streamline the transfer process, make it better, but.
That’s only the first hurdle. Can we set these people up to for success when they get to four year and feel like they can actually, they’re, they have the right amount of rigor. They’re prepared and they’re going to take the right classes in the right sequence. And they’re going to shorten their time and actually be able to deliver on why they went to community college in the first place, which was potentially to save money, all this other stuff. So it’s not just will this credit transfer, it’s a matter of.
the sequencing, the rigor, and making sure that there’s actually real alignment rather than just we’ll accept this or won’t be.
Tania LaViolet (26:54.475)
Exactly. And just one thing that I wanted to add to your comment was its alignment with postgraduate success, right? So it’s not just completion of the associate degree for the community college, building these maps so that the students will not only complete their associate degree, but thrive at the four-year institution within a major. And for the four-year institution, your incentive for that is for a student to be strong in their major so that they can then thrive in the
labor market after graduating.
Matt Sterenberg (27:27.328)
And your final strategy is tailoring transfer and non-academic supports to foster trust and engagement. This sounds like we’re going to need to hire more people, Tania. No, but tell me a little bit more about this. This is a tough one because I feel like the more and more you are, like this is a people problem in a way, isn’t it? Like this is a relationship thing. Like we can’t just build systems and hit the on button and expect it to just.
function perfectly. Like a lot of this is building trust and sometimes that’s really hard to measure. So this one’s a really important one, but it’s, think, a little bit harder to quantify and define. Like how do we actually engage with students? How do we make sure our institution is like giving all the wraparound services related to transfer? But tell me a little bit more about what you mean.
Tania LaViolet (28:22.649)
Well, you said it’s hard to quantify, but folks have actually quantified this. you know, about half of transfer intending students do not access transfer services or transfer advising, which is astounding, which means that they are doing it on their own, which makes, you know, those maps even more important. So what the third strategy in the playbook really tries to elevate is this idea of making
tailored transfer advising and these non-academic supports inescapable. And Matt, you had mentioned, this sounds like you got to hire more people. And yeah, there’s some of that. In some cases, yes, you do need to invest in hiring more advisors and structuring more non-academic supports for students. But I think historically we’ve seen that when you do that, there’s some ROI in terms of the.
the tuition revenues you get from retention. But that aside, this idea of inescapable advising, not waiting for students to raise their hand and say, I’m a transfer student and I need help. Because when we wait for students to raise their hand, we’ve already introduced disparities into the system. It’s the students who know to raise their hand, who know to self advocate.
right, that are going to access these resources. So what the colleges in our research did was say, OK, how do we scale it so that every single student who’s coming into our college is going to get transfer advising? And this was both at the community college and at the university level after students had transferred. So a couple of examples that did not require more staffing, it was just a clever use of existing resources.
There’s one college in our research, Tech, that uses their student success course. community colleges across the country have these student success courses. They have all variety of these student success courses. But what Durham Tech does is they have one student success course that all students are required to take, regardless of whether you are all associate degree students, I should say. And as both associate degree students,
Tania LaViolet (30:42.775)
the applied associates and the associates of arts. And all these students have to take it. the one output from this course is that every single student who takes it has to develop a transfer plan to a specific transfer destination using maps that the college has developed with its partners. And so what that is in effect is transfer advising. You have classrooms filled with students
who are developing these plans, tailoring those four-year maps to their personal circumstances and saying, okay, this is how I’m gonna get from point A to point B. You don’t miss a student doing that. And in fact, at Durham Tech, they have very few exceptions for students to get out of taking that class. And we’ve seen that at other institutions and it works extremely well.
Aspen Prize finalists seminal state in Florida. They have a version of the student success course as well where students again are developing a plan in that first term and then uploading that plan into their advising platforms so they can track whether or not they’re progressing through those plans. But again, it’s getting students to engage with these services, with this support.
and making it so that it is inevitable, an inevitability for students that they’re going to get the support to navigate the pathways. you know, that’s another, a major finding. And then, you know, to support those efforts, making sure that the systems are in place, that advisors have the knowledge and the tools at their disposal to offer the best advising they can.
You know, that’s in contrast to what we see across the country, know, advisors spending hours and hours of their own time sifting through documents, trying to figure out what are the courses that transfer and then sharing them in paper form with their students. And that’s not a dig at advisors. They’re doing the work. They’re trying to navigate these pathways along students. And so how can college leaders really support their advising corps who are such a lifeline for students?
Tania LaViolet (32:58.615)
by giving them the tools, by giving them the professional development that they need to be able to do their jobs well. And then the final aspect of this strategy is a transfer-specific approach to holistic success. And so those are the non-academic supports. And so we know that students’ lives are multilayered and multidimensional that go well beyond what they’re experiencing in the classroom. you know,
Colleges, many colleges already have invested in things like food pantries and other non-academic supports that get at student basic needs that they need in order to thrive in the classroom. And what I thought was interesting in the schools that we engaged with was that they had ways to engage transfer students specifically with those resources and link it to the transfer student experience, again, to make it as inevitable as possible.
for students who needed those resources to be able to engage and benefit from them and not waiting for students to raise their hand to say, I need help. But connecting that to the transfer pathway, especially at the four-year institution where students have less time to figure out where these resources might lie, how can you make sure that it’s inevitable and visible for students that again are going to be at your institution for what we hope will be a shorter amount of time.
Matt Sterenberg (34:22.88)
And I like too that it removes some of the stigma away. Like you said, only the people that raise their hands, right? And how many times have we heard the terms non-traditional student or traditional student, or this is a transfer student. And the more that we can just say, this is part of your experience, every student’s gonna participate. takes away some of the stigma of, and even for the four year to say like, this is a very normal thing.
And then when we actually have more students transferring, it becomes more normal for you to be at a four year and you see, you, spent two years at a community college or a year at a community college. And we take some of that stuff away where it’s not, I don’t know, like a less than thing where, you took some courses at a, at a community college. Like that’s what I really like about the playbook is that it’s a holistic approach where we have quality and rigor. We’re aligning program pathways or taking away the stigma.
and we’re giving the services to everybody and we’re making it a priority. So I really think the research you’re doing is very valuable, whether you’re an academic advisor, whether you’re a college president, whether you’re a registrar thinking about how you can make these pathways that much more impactful. So Tania, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today.
Tania LaViolet (35:43.203)
Thanks for having me, Matt. This was a great conversation.
