SUNY endeavors to minimize credit loss by introducing new policies, procedures, and tools that will aid faculty and staff who are assessing course equivalents. SUNY will work with campuses to capture and provide more data to help evaluate courses while simultaneously creating a data-driven process that is equitable and transparent.
To better support students as they seek the baccalaureate degree, SUNY needs to expand and enhance cross-institutional collaboration - particularly regional collaborations between community colleges and SUNY state-operated campuses - to help students successfully transition and remain supported through graduation. This category of recommendations is a broad appeal to address a key issue revealed in campus response surveys and findings from all task force work groups: SUNY two-year and four-year campuses often lacked communication and coordination needed to support and effectively advise students.
Currently, early intent and student goal data is not shared or made available to potential transfer campuses and is not universally required to be collected. As a result, we cannot effectively identify potential transfer students in need of advisement and support or share their intent with prospective transfer campuses.
To ensure a commitment to a student’s success from the outset, SUNY should institute common, required, system-wide data elements and tracking mechanisms to identify transfer student intent. Ideally, data would be collected at the point of admission and would seek to (1) identify students at two-year institutions who indicate they intend to transfer, (2) identify target or potential schools and programs to facilitate early intervention and support, (3) identify the Transfer Path the student is pursuing and (4) obtain a release and FERPA waiver so campuses can seamlessly communicate and support the student in advance of transferring.
The CCRC has reported that less than 50% of community college students seek advising to set goals.1 Campuses have little information about student transfer interests or exploration unless they consult an advisor and have a relationship. Having an easy online tool where students could initiate contact and explore transfer options could improve student-advisor transfer connections.
Create a student-facing “transfer profile” to facilitate campus communication and to help students explore and manage their transfer process. The transfer profile would be established based on early transfer self-identification and managed via a student-facing web application. Through the transfer profile tools, students can maintain their transfer intention and educational goals, review campus admission and transfer information, communicate with transfer advisors or admissions counselors, provide needed early information to aid schools in providing support, and readily provide transcripts and other required academic records. The creation of this platform would provide a notable benefit to transfer students, in addition to serving as a key advising and recruiting tool for prospective baccalaureate campuses. Ideally, this tool would be integrated into existing SUNY Enrollment Management technology initiatives, including the forthcoming SUNY Digital Front Door to provide a consistent, seamless experience. SUNY Federation would also be used ideally, so students could easily maintain their profile without additional credentials.
1 Community College Research Center, “Advising and Student Supports at Community Colleges.”
Currently, any program proposal or revision requires a campus curricular committee to review the program’s transfer imprint, and to show that it either aligns with a Transfer Path or provides a reasonable path for students choosing to transfer. While each program undergoes this review, information about Transfer Paths and a program’s alignment with a path is not required on campus websites or within catalogs. The presence of Transfer Paths alongside degree plans and curricular information can better inform students, faculty, and staff who refer to the catalog for official requirements and guidance.
Require campuses to include program-level Transfer Path information and provide additional information about SUNY Transfer Paths and their course transfer guarantees in their catalogs. This can be achieved by creating site templates for catalog entries and web pages to be implemented at the start of an academic year. Ensuring that Transfer Paths are promoted alongside relevant programs can be accomplished by establishing and reinforcing a requirement to include Transfer Path information in catalogs during program reviews. Transfer Paths should also be a critical component of admissions and enrollment management marketing initiatives. All SUNY campuses should develop literature for current students and for recruiting and marketing purposes that focus on the transfer options and opportunities available.
With a substantial number of campus respondents reporting having little or no knowledge of Transfer Paths, it’s critical that SUNY improve visibility and promote the use of Transfer Paths by offering training and orientation for faculty and staff who serve transfer students.
Training should be developed and made available to various student-serving groups (advisors, admissions officers, faculty advisors, etc.…) with tailored learning objectives. Training should include an orientation for curriculum managers engaged in academic program development to familiarize faculty and staff with Transfer Path policies and procedures and their connections to program requirements. Because the review and development of Transfer Paths requires faculty and staff committee representation, a correlating training agenda should also be created to onboard subject matter experts who serve as faculty advisors and developers of SUNY Transfer Paths. Training for various groups may also be included as a module or learning objective in a comprehensive academic advising certificate program, also proposed by the Transfer Task Force and discussed in detail in Recommendation 3.2. Transfer Path orientation and training programs should not be restricted to policy and procedural guidance. It will be critical for SUNY to also develop training and orientation that pays significant attention to high-impact practices and associated support programs that should accompany Transfer Paths.
The current SUNY Transfer Path website and databases are outmoded and difficult to navigate. In addition, upkeep is difficult, involving the manual management of multiple databases and sites. Students, faculty and staff have reported having difficulty navigating the dense material and multiple sources of information.
Devise a new online tool that is more accessible, integrated with SUNY catalog data, and operates without needing to visit multiple pages and sites. A current revision to the SUNY Transfer Path online tool is underway as part of a comprehensive transfer portal development. It is recommended that the tool development be more tightly integrated with the forthcoming Digital Front Door and that it be more aligned with SUNY Applications Service Center (ASC) initiatives and admission processes. The result should be a one-stop, database-driven SUNY Transfer Path resource that provides direct access to SUNY Core Course descriptions and campus-level equivalencies. Finally, campuses need additional functionality for online tools to more easily update, maintain and obtain reports and review information.
Due partly to the COVID Pandemic, and the timing of the Transfer Task Force, there has not been any significant Transfer Path review or redevelopment since 2020.
Review and reinvigorate the Transfer Path Program and cast a wider net to recruit additional faculty and disciplinary experts. The Task Force asserts that the success of the Transfer Path program is not only largely dependent on enhancing its visibility, but also by generating additional faculty buy-in through active engagement with development and review processes.
The existing SUNY Seamless Transfer policy provides thousands of SUNY students with guaranteed Transfer Pathways and assurances that SUNY General Education courses will be accepted between campuses. The policies provide a great deal of flexibility and permit campuses to maintain academic standards while simultaneously supporting students with guaranteed transferability of key courses. Since its initial development in 2010, however, the transfer landscape has changed significantly, as has the depth and breadth of programs. To promote greater transferability and greater credit acceptance, the Transfer Task Force recommends that the Seamless Transfer policy be modernized and refined to account for the current needs and realities of New York’s students.
The CCRC, the Aspen Institute, the American Council on Education (ACE), the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO) and the Council on Higher Education Accreditation have put forth consistent recommendations to guide and reinforce the importance of progressive transfer policies. These statements have been embraced and extended and their principles have been integrated into reforms and programs across the country.1
Create a SUNY policy statement in accord with national initiatives and principles from the statements cited above to improve transfer. Most notably, in shared working group discussions, the Joint Statement on the Transfer and Award of Credit2 along with the work of the Community College Research Center (CCRC) and the Aspen Institute3 served as defining guideposts for the Transfer Task Force.
The SUNY policy statement should include the following seven core principles found in the Joint Statement cited above. In summary:
1 See especially the “Joint Statement on the Transfer and Award of Credit.”
2 Gottlieb, Mitchell, and Jackson-Hammond, “Joint Statement on the Transfer and Award of Credit.”
3 Wyner, Dean, and Fink, “The Transfer Playbook: Essential Practices for Two- and Four-Year Colleges.”
The current Seamless Transfer policy guarantees that students who successfully complete a general education transfer course are granted requirement completion regardless of the campus minimum grade standard, and that approved SUNY Transfer Path courses are guaranteed credit and course equivalencies if they are completed with a grade of C or better. However, grade standards do not extend beyond these areas of coursework, nor do they address credit received through standardized tests. Each campus maintains a different set of standards which is confusing to prospective transfer students and may result in lost credit.
SUNY will create a faculty advisory group to assess and implement minimum course grade standards that will promote consistency and ease-of-transfer. Specifically, policies should focus on creating consistent campus-level standards and establishing course acceptance minimums that (a) do not differ based on source campus (b) are applied to local and transfer students equally, (c) do not differ based on course modality without justification and (d) are clearly identified in campus and program literature.
The faculty advisory group will also assess minimum accepted scores for AP and IB and promote standardization to the greatest degree possible to guarantee student credit acceptance. The advisory group will review the standards throughout SUNY alongside standards and models developed in states or systems such as Oregon and Ohio, where minimum acceptable grade definitions are coupled with periodic review and assessment.
Clear guidance should also be devised specifying where and how a campus is permitted to have higher minimum grade or test score requirements, and how campuses will be required to communicate exceptions and standards to students.
Currently there is no SUNY-wide standard or guidance specifying the minimum required correspondence of learning objectives between transfer and equivalent courses. Campuses use varying standards, many of which are not published or included in campus policies. Most campuses have standardized and well-reasoned course equivalencies, but also have varying thresholds for the level of “overlap” or correspondence between a transfer course and their local course.
Establish a minimum correspondence standard to provide consistent and reasonable guidelines for course evaluation. The resulting policy should focus on developing minimum standards that align with prevailing national standards and practices. For example, Maryland and West Virginia have implemented statewide regulations that require the acceptance of courses if the receiving school determines that at least 70 percent of the course learning objectives have been met. Efforts should be made to provide for exclusions and added guidance where there are required outcomes for pre-requisite work, accreditors, licensure or certification. In these instances, the differences must be clearly communicated to students in policy and campus catalogs.
Because the goal when articulating credit should always be to accept as much credit as possible within the bounds of campus and SUNY policies, credit that is denied should be automatically reviewed or reconsidered to assure the decision is in accord with policy and/or the entry is accurate. Due to the high volume of transfer equivalency reviews, the potential for error or inaccuracies in data-entry is significant. What’s more, the use of OCR, machine reading, and emergent AI technologies can result in inadvertent technical errors.
Additionally, while there are various national statistics that estimate the number of credits accepted versus not, SUNY does not currently have the ability to determine an accurate percentage of accepted transfer credits. This is due in part to prevailing practices where only accepted credits are entered into information systems, and non-accepted credits are not recorded, nor are the reasons for non-acceptance. Additionally, there are multiple reasons that transfer courses or course credits cannot be accepted. By cataloging reasons, SUNY can better determine patterns and assess policy and procedure to help address issues and provide more insight into credit acceptance levels.
To encourage thorough review of course credit evaluations, promote the acceptance of more credits and better capture the actual number and percentage of courses accepted:
(1) All received courses or prior learning experiences should be entered into the student information system (SIS) or transfer evaluation system even when that course or experience is not accepted, assigned credit, or applied to the degree.
(2) When a course or experience is not accepted, assigned credit, or applied to the degree, an automatic second review process is carried out, to assure the credit cannot be applied. This automatic review should be embedded in campus policy or procedure.
(3) When a course or experience is not accepted, assigned credit, or applied to the degree, a reason should be recorded for assessment and appeal purposes (via pre-defined common codes).
SUNY will continue to invest in tools and technologies that can be used by students, faculty and staff alike.
When course articulations are not pre-established, faculty and staff evaluating a course may be unable to easily identify the course learning objectives or learning outcomes. Establishing a learning objectives repository and including learning objectives in catalog descriptions would be of notable value when evaluating course content for equivalencies. Creating these resources would reduce the reliance on student-provided syllabi and course materials. Surfacing data for use by advisors and evaluators can also dramatically reduce evaluation times and cut down on time-consuming research.
SUNY will develop a public University-wide course catalog that includes course-level student learning outcomes. The database or repository may be achieved in part by using existing SIRIS course data submissions, which already provide SUNY-wide course information and details. Student learning outcomes would need to be captured and included in the catalog record. The current Transfer Path Core Course database may also serve as a resource in catalog development, as it is routinely maintained and includes all Transfer Path courses and the paths which they are associated with. In addition, SUNY General Education courses have defined SLOs for each category, that can be incorporated into the repository.
Currently, students must actively request and pay for a transcript to be sent from one SUNY institution to another when transferring coursework as part of admission or when pursuing coursework at a host institution. This results in added effort and cost for the student and adds time to application and evaluation processes. Where electronic means are not available, it creates a wasteful paper exchange and mailing expense. The current use of the inter-university transcript (IUT) is also lacking. While all SUNY institutions working with our national provider (47 campuses) can use the IUT process, only a small minority of campuses utilize it according to a 2024 review of cross-registration transcript data.
SUNY will expand the use of the SUNY university-wide agreement with our national transcript provider for greater efficiency and cost savings. The agreement includes IUT services which enable sending transcripts SUNY-to-SUNY at no cost to the institution or student. Currently these services are limited to administrative, reverse transfer or cross registration activities, and only apply when initiated by an authorized staff member. Current and future agreements or service commitments shall be revised to allow for broader use of the IUT to apply to all SUNY-to-SUNY transcript transmissions.
In addition, SUNY will create a means to make transcripts centrally accessible by SUNY Enrollment Management to facilitate transfer admissions. This would permit the SUNY Application Services Center to obtain and send transcripts automatically when students apply, versus requiring students to individually request transcripts at their expense. Providing this ability will dramatically improve the transfer admission process by allowing for the near-instant receipt and transmission of transcript data.
The use of the university-wide contract for transcript services is currently optional. This results in different capabilities on campuses, and some campuses lack electronic transcription and IUT access altogether. SUNY will make participation in electronic transcription and IUT compulsory. Resources shall be provided to assist resource-constrained campuses and permit the use of other compliant services and SIS-based electronic formats (such as XML or SPEEDE) where licenses and formats are available at low or no cost, and/or are provided as a baseline feature in a student information system.