For a process that seems like it should be straightforward, students transferring between colleges often run into an alarming number of hurdles. A new book offers a map around many of them.

Jaime Smith, a longtime college adviser, has published A Complete Guide to College Transfer. It’s meant as a how-to for prospective transfer students.

To Smith’s credit, the book is clearly written, logically organized and full of brief case studies to make the concepts concrete. Cases include students with military backgrounds, students with family financial issues, students with diagnosed disabilities who try to go without accommodations and students with spotty high school records. In other words, she doesn’t just default to the student that systems seem to have in mind.

The target reader for the book seems to be an early-semester community college student who wants to vertically transfer to a four-year college or university. (Smith acknowledges lateral [two-year–to–two-year] and reverse [four-year–to–two-year] transfers early in the book, but they aren’t her focus.) She offers several tips that may seem obvious to those of us who’ve spent years in the industry but aren’t necessarily obvious to civilians. For example:

• Keep copies of the syllabi for every course taken prior to transfer, in case they’re challenged by the receiving school. The same goes for textbook information.
• If a given course or semester goes sideways, it’s usually better to take a W than an F.

• Prestige is much less important than fit. Fit can refer to anything from availability of a chosen major to the social climate on a campus.
• Financial aid offers can be appealed.
• If the destination college isn’t entirely online, housing options for transfer students are often much more sparse than for first-time students. In expensive areas, it’s crucial to get realistic estimates of the actual cost of living.
• Admission to an institution and admission to a major are not the same thing. At some universities, some very popular majors have their own entrance requirements.

She also refers to a host of websites that students can use to help discern which classes transfer where, how to calculate GPAs and so forth.

I’ll add a couple suggestions and a couple caveats.

First, as helpful as websites can be, it’s often useful for students to check in with transfer advisers on the community college campus to find out about the nuances of local articulation agreements and patterns of transfer. For example, a given school might accept a course in transfer, but relegate it to “free elective” status. Free elective status is where credits go to die.

Alternately, many destination colleges will only accept a relatively low number of credits in the intended major, but they’re agnostic as to what those credits are. In cases like those, a long list of courses will show up on the list as transferable, but a student can only bring, say, three or four of them before they start getting disallowed. Local advisers will know that; websites often fail to make it clear.

Local transfer counselors also often know about the presence and magnitude of transfer scholarships at given schools. Getting that information early can save time and help with course selection. I’ve seen cases in which one transfer school wants two semesters of U.S. history, but another wants two semesters of world history for the same program. Knowing that up front and knowing which destination school a student has in mind, can inform course selection at the CC and save money, time and frustration.

One objection: On page 146, Smith offers a vague “it depends” response to the question of whether it’s worthwhile to finish an associate degree before transferring. From her summary, though, you wouldn’t know that many statewide gen ed bloc transfer agreements require students to complete the degree; in the absence of a degree, receiving schools can cherry-pick credits, which often leads to credit loss.

Completed degrees can also get around issues of the stray class with a C-minus or D grade, or dual-enrollment classes that might otherwise be received more skeptically. It’s possible to get a fair deal without a completed degree, but the odds are much higher with the degree in hand. Having the degree in hand also provides insurance in case life happens during the junior or senior year and the student has to step away; it’s better to step away with an associate degree than as a pure dropout. Leaving those considerations out can be misleading.

This isn’t Smith’s fault, but I couldn’t help but notice the number of cases in which she recommended that a student who had to leave a four-year school spend a semester or two at a community college before returning. That strategy can make sense in some cases, but it flies below the radar of most policymakers and public opinion leaders. I’ve long been struck by the gap between our IPEDS graduation rates and the percentage of bachelor’s degree grads with community college credits; you’d think we’d get more credit than we do. Alas.

Still, from the perspective of her target audience, the only really material error is the one about associate degrees. The rest is accessible, useful and practical. Nicely done.