Transfer and, more generally, obtaining college credits from multiple sources, are far more common than many people realize: Over 50 percent of bachelor’s recipients have credits from colleges other than from where they’re graduating. Transfer is also far less successful than many people realize: Although about 80 percent of community college freshmen plan to earn at least a bachelor’s degree (for which first they have to transfer), six years later only about 16 percent have attained that goal. How can a picture help us help transfer students?

Let’s take a look at this picture:

What you see are blue dots all over the United States. Each dot represents one college or university (let’s call it the sending institution) for which another college or university (let’s call it the receiving institution) has one or more rules (equivalencies) regarding how to count the course credits that a student might seek to transfer from that sending institution to that receiving institution. The equivalencies exist because, in the past, one or more students sought to transfer course credits from the sending to the receiving institution.

What you are seeing in this diagram are some of the actual data loaded into the national version of Transfer Explorer (inspired by the City University of New York’s Transfer Explorer, also known as T-Rex). The national version of Transfer Explorer is a website that publicly and freely shows how course credits transfer among, and count for requirements at, United States higher education institutions. How many receiving institutions do you think generated these blue dots, and where do you think those institutions are located?

The blue dots represent the actual data from only the first 19 receiving institutions loaded into the national Transfer Explorer database, and these receiving institutions are located only in the states of Connecticut, South Carolina and Washington. The essential point is that the blue dots are all over the map. Students are transferring course credits from every state into these 19 institutions in Connecticut, South Carolina and Washington.

For example, see that blue dot sitting by itself in the middle of the upper part of Nevada? That blue dot is Great Basin College. Great Basin College, with a total enrollment of about 4,000 students, offers associate and bachelor’s degrees in a rural setting. Students from Great Basin College have tried to transfer course credits to five of Transfer Explorer’s first 19 colleges: College of Charleston (S.C.), Horry-Georgetown Technical College (S.C.), Southern Connecticut State University (Conn.), the University of South Carolina (S.C.) and Washington State University (Wash.). As a result, those five institutions have a total of 198 rules—equivalencies—regarding how Great Basin College’s course credits will count at those receiving colleges.

To anyone familiar with transfer data, this is not surprising. Recent data from the National Student Clearinghouse indicate that about one-fourth of transfer students transfer across state lines. Others do not cross state lines but nevertheless transfer to an institution that is many miles away from where they started their higher education journey. Recent Gallup–Walton Foundation research found that more than three-quarters of the members of Gen Z (now ages 13 to 28) are interested in moving out of their current area, so transferring to a distant college or university might be increasing.

What are the implications of these findings? How can these findings help us to ensure that our efforts benefit the most students?

Currently, the most popular strategy for helping transfer students involves articulation agreements. These are essentially contracts between (usually) pairs of institutions specifying how course credits will transfer among the members of that pair for one or more related majors.

Many higher education professionals believe that if they just keep working on articulation agreements, eventually all credits will transfer seamlessly and transfer students will be more likely to succeed. The problem is that articulation agreements are very time-consuming and difficult to construct, maintain and communicate. Plus, given the numbers of majors and courses at each college, to encompass all, or even most, likely transfer paths, the numbers of articulation agreements needed can quickly become astronomical.

An aspect of this problem is that agreements between pairs of colleges typically involve colleges in close proximity to each other. However, as we have just seen, many students cross state lines when they transfer and therefore are not benefited by these agreements.

Let’s consider a well-known example of an articulation agreement—the ADVANCE program of Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA) and nearby George Mason University. Course credits of students in this program transfer seamlessly from NOVA to George Mason. ADVANCE has gotten much attention and praise due to its high levels of transfer student success.

Nevertheless, fewer than 10 percent of NOVA students are members of this program, which means that over 90 percent are not. The students who are not members of ADVANCE may not intend to transfer to George Mason or may not meet the criteria for the program (at least a 2.0 GPA and no more than 30 college credits already earned). Tools in addition to the ADVANCE program are needed to help the great majority of NOVA students who eventually want to transfer and obtain at least a bachelor’s degree but who are not members of ADVANCE.

Articulation agreements can be very useful for certain students under certain circumstances. For example, CUNY has a dual-admission program (a sort of supercharged articulation agreement) called the Justice Academy in which students are admitted simultaneously to a community and a bachelor’s college in one of several justice-related majors. When it is time for these students to transfer from the community to the bachelor’s college, they do so seamlessly, and our analyses show a high rate of bachelor’s degree attainment for these students. But most CUNY students do not want to major in these fields and, even within CUNY, there are too many majors and too many potential transfer paths to have articulation agreements for each possible path.

Enter the national version of Transfer Explorer. The original CUNY T-Rex shows, on an open-access website, how every CUNY course transfers to every other CUNY college. CUNY T-Rex shows not only how course credits will be transferred but what program requirements will be satisfied at the new college by the transferred credits. CUNY T-Rex contains 1.6 million transfer credit rules. Using this tool, students and those who support them can choose courses, majors and institutions that will maximize the efficiency of a student’s higher education path, decreasing their time to graduation and increasing their probability of graduation.

Supported by grants from seven philanthropic organizations and inspired by CUNY T-Rex, the nonprofit organization Ithaka (the same organization that provides the higher education community with digital scholarly resources such as JSTOR) has created the national, nonprofit, open-access version of CUNY T-Rex.

This Transfer Explorer already contains information for member institutions in four states, with many more institutions and states to come. This website can help any student wishing to transfer credits to any of the member institutions. In addition, the new Transfer Explorer’s data comes from frequent automatic feeds from the receiving institutions, minimizing the work that needs to be done by those institutions and ensuring that the data shown in Transfer Explorer is always up to date.

If we want to help transfer students succeed, as well as help the very many students who do not actually transfer but who obtain credits from more than one source, we need to use data to determine where best to spend our time and money. What efforts or strategies will help the most students most efficiently? What we know about students’ transfer destinations suggests that national solutions, such as Transfer Explorer, are a good way to provide this assistance.

Much has been written, for many years, about the pitfalls in higher education of administrators not taking into account the delayed consequences of their actions. (The future, and not just the immediate, consequences of our actions do matter.) But we must also not be shortsighted in terms of place. We should not focus only on what is near in time or in location.

When it comes to student transfer, a picture is worth a thousand words (maybe even the 1,358 words of this column).