Nearly four in 10 adult Americans have tried to transfer credit toward a college degree or credential. Of those, 58 percent lost credits in the process. For some, the consequences were severe: using up financial aid and repeating classes they’d already passed. Sixteen percent reported giving up on higher education altogether because the transfer process was simply too difficult.

These aren’t just statistics. They represent learners and workers who lost time, money and faith in a system that promised them opportunity.

Many have been trying to address these issues, and great work is underway. But the effort to transform transfer and learning mobility still lacks a coordinated and sustained focus at scale. Transfer and learning mobility are still treated as niche issues affecting a small percentage of students, rather than an increasingly common reality for today’s learners that should compel higher education to evolve. We have not yet achieved the fundamental mindset shifts, or built the supportive infrastructure, that are needed to treat all learning fairly, but the pressure is on. And with pressure comes opportunity.

Year 5 of Connecting With You on ‘Beyond Transfer’

Welcome to year five of the “Beyond Transfer” column on Inside Higher Ed—a column that seeks to elevate the voices of expert practitioners, researchers, advocates, policymakers, students and others who are seeking to overhaul not just the transfer experience, but the entire ecosystem related to ensuring that all Americans benefit from their hard-earned and hard-learned skills and competencies and receive the economic mobility they deserve.

Each year, we kick off the column with some reflections on what we’ve learned through listening to and collaborating with all of you. At Sova, we’ve had the privilege of working at multiple levels of the transfer and learning mobility ecosystem (hereafter “transfer”): facilitating national expert groups such as the Beyond Transfer Policy Advisory Board and the Learning Evaluation and Recognition for the Next Generation (LEARN) Commission (co-convened with the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers); advancing state-level work from California’s AB 928 Associate Degree for Transfer Intersegmental Implementation Committee to the Texas Transfer Alliance led by Educate Texas; supporting institutional collaborations such as the Acceleration to Credits Working Group and the CCC-CSU Transfer Collaborative; leveraging AI to transform the learning mobility experience through the AI Transfer and Articulation Infrastructure Network (ATAIN); and elevating student voice through our social media platforms.

As we look ahead, we are connecting the dots on some insights that, while not new, have been at the forefront of our minds over the last year.

• Credit loss is prevalent, damaging and unfair. Matt Giani, Lauren Schudde and Tasneem Sultana present a rigorous analysis of credit loss in Texas and describe its damaging consequences. In their study of almost 29,000 community college–to–public university first-time transfers, 83 percent of transfers experienced some credit loss. Perhaps most alarming is that this credit loss was among those who followed the rules and transferred to a discipline-aligned program of study (i.e., maintained the same major after transfer).
• Transfer of credit is a shared American experience. In these politically divisive times, it’s rare to find a topic where common ground is still possible, but transfer is an issue that resonates across party lines. As referenced earlier, a recent survey of adult Americans conducted by Public Agenda for Sova and the Beyond Transfer Policy Advisory Board illuminates both how prevalent transfer is and how Americans’ experiences with transfer shape their attitudes toward colleges and universities. Not only have four in 10 Americans sought to transfer credit, but it’s also the case that a large majority of Americans across the ideological spectrum agree that colleges and universities should be held accountable for honoring learning and accepting credits.

• The lack of change in transfer and learning mobility is harming higher ed’s reputation. The survey found that those who tried to transfer credit were more likely to feel that higher education institutions care more about making money than about educating students. At a time of declining public trust in higher ed, this is a dangerous signal. In recent focus groups on public attitudes toward college affordability and value conducted by Sova with support from Lumina Foundation, problems with credit transfer have been raised spontaneously by participants in every focus group conducted thus far (12 focus groups across four states).

Credit transfer is too often built upon unfair contradictions and expectations. Consider, for example:

• Students are encouraged and even expected to explore their options and pursue a broad education, and yet they are simultaneously forced to choose a preparatory pathway aligned to a receiving institution’s requirements. Because they cannot know where they will be accepted for transfer, they are forced to bet their credits on a single guess.
• Learners are expected to accept admissions offers before they know how their prior coursework and other learning experiences will be applied to completion.
• Courses evaluated for transfer are reviewed to ensure they are equivalent to a receiving institution’s courses, without acknowledgment that a single receiving institution may also have multiple faculty (and graduate students) teaching similar courses in a variety of ways and preparation within the receiving institution is uneven as well.

• Impressive reform efforts in transfer and learning mobility are underway in many settings, with state policy influencers playing important roles. There is much to celebrate, from the leadership of large transfer-sending institutions such as the Alamo Colleges District and Maricopa Community Colleges, to technology initiatives such as ATAIN and Transfer Explorer, to the individual champions who dedicate their personal time in spaces like Transfer Nation to create knowledge and community.

The Texas Transfer Alliance, with the generous support of Ascendium Education Philanthropy, is leading statewide work focused on building a single, regional Target Pathway that provides all students—regardless of whether they started in high school dual credit or in community college—with clarity through a 60-credit pathway by program that meets requirements for high school graduation, associate degree and eligibility for transfer to multiple bachelor’s-granting institutions in the region. Texas policies related to funding (e.g., HB 8) and data transparency (e.g., SB 25 and SB 3039) are creating the conditions that urge institutions to initiate reforms such as these.

• Accreditors are beginning to shift and evolve. Much as most Americans are calling for accountability for credit transfer, accreditors are also calling for change. Writing on behalf of the seven federally recognized accrediting commissions overseeing approximately 3,000 institutions, the Council of Regional Accrediting Commissions (C-RAC) stated:

While this may seem like common sense to a layperson, this represents a significant mindset shift. As the arbiters of quality and gatekeepers for federal financial aid, increased accreditor attention to transfer stands to motivate institutional behavior in meaningful ways.

• And yet, reform efforts in transfer and learning mobility remain slow and episodic. The field has not yet launched a movement equal in scope and depth to the size of the problem we are facing. Higher ed was built to privilege some learners and types of learning over others. Confronting this bias head-on and committing to a new modus operandi is necessary for higher education to evolve and maintain its relevance with today’s learners.

The Path Forward

As we dive headlong into 2026, we’re placing our bets on a few fronts.

The first front is changing assumptions and mindsets. There are a number of ways we are urging the field to shift the lens on transfer and learning mobility. For example, in vertical transfer, the large majority of students cannot know to which institution they will be accepted and able to transfer. That is how the system is designed. It is therefore no longer acceptable for each receiving institution to consider it fair to impose a slew of differing transfer requirements, as it makes it impossible for a student to choose a 60-credit preparatory pathway that works across potential transfer destinations. The Target Pathways work in Texas is designed to ensure students are eligible for transfer to multiple institutions. That needs to become the gold standard.

Secondly, we need a mindset shift akin to the goal (not yet fully realized) of developmental education redesign. Traditional prerequisite remediation operates on the assumption that students are not “college-ready” unless they prove they are through placement tests. The corequisite approach—backed by solid evidence of greatly improved student outcomes—begins with the assumption, instead, that the large majority of students are ready to start in college-level courses and institutions have a responsibility to support the success of the students they admit through how they design and teach credit-bearing courses.

In transfer and learning mobility today, the prevailing mindset sounds a lot like that of traditional prerequisite remediation: Students are assumed to not be “transfer-ready” unless they prove it through a process that interrogates their transfer coursework and other prior learning experiences—often including reviews of textbooks, assignments and other minutiae—to prove similarity to “equivalent” courses at the receiving institution. Similar to the goal of dev ed redesign and aligned to how accreditors are shifting their thinking, what would it look like to shift the mindset to: The large majority of learners have been prepared enough by the sum of their learning experiences to be ready for further education and all institutions have a responsibility to support their success after transfer?

In addition to work on mindsets, we are focused in a few other key areas:

• Use tech/AI to leapfrog. AI can’t solve all our problems and we know it comes with many new ones, but learning mobility will be transformed as technology finally allows us to move beyond slow, manual, course-to-course reviews that result in limited credit mobility and confusing and conflicting information for learners. Tech offers opportunities to identify equivalencies at a level that human review will never achieve and provide students with exciting navigation support, blowing open the gates that currently restrict credit transfer, as ATAIN seeks to do.
• Demand transparency for credential applicability. A combination of policy innovation in states (e.g., SB 3039 in Texas) and advances in technology (e.g., the articulation coverage score) lead us to a moment where we can—and must—focus in on transparency about whether learners and workers are getting credit that accelerates them toward their goals.
• Give learners real clarity and guarantees. Collaborate across partners to build one Target Pathway for a region (by program) and layer on guaranteed program-level admissions programs with targeted financial aid, dedicated advising and belonging initiatives that create a giant vacuum that pulls students through to completion.
• Shift incentives through policy. So long as institutions continue to operate in a world that primarily incentivizes enrollment, nothing will change. Policymakers must step in and change the incentive structures that drive institutional behavior—both the financial and reputational incentives. What does it mean to recognize and reward institutions when they not only accept transfer students, but commit to the work of ensuring all credit for prior learning is counted toward credentials so that learners and workers are supported to complete in a timely manner? In its recent report, the LEARN Commission points to the opportunity for policymakers to enhance transparency and create new incentives that accelerate institutional change.

The question isn’t whether the current transfer credit system is broken. The data makes that clear. The question is whether higher education has the courage to take on this challenge in a coordinated, sustained and scaled way. Too many learners are losing credits, losing money and losing hope. It’s time to do better.