Reverse transfers have become increasingly common over the last several years. Reverse transfers allow students who start at a two-year college and transfer to a four-year institution to earn an associate degree on the path to their bachelor’s. As 70 to 80 percent of students who transfer from a two-year to a four-year institution do so without earning an associate degree, providing reverse transfer provides a good milestone along the way to a bachelor's degree.
Some of the challenges or questions that arise when discussing reverse transfer include how to navigate FERPA by deciding which school holds responsibility for the records, how to identify substitutions or award credit for required courses, and which school counts the student in their graduation statistics. An emerging trend is to provide students a blanket FERPA release before their transfer to a four-year school.
A case study: Ohio
Ohio was one of 13 states to receive funding to implement a Credit When It's Due (CWID) initiative in 2012. Ohio experienced quite a bit of success in this process and gained a significant amount of knowledge and best practices for other university and states to consider when implementing reverse transfer procedures.
Through the leadership of the Board of Regents, the state developed five steps to reverse transfer implementation.
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Student Identification. The Ohio Board of Regents uses the Higher Education Information system to apply the eligibility criteria and identify which students are potentially eligible for reverse transfer, and then sends the list of potentially eligible students to the participating universities.
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Consent. As part of Ohio’s opt-in consent process, the universities send a letter, endorsed by the university and the community college, to the list of potentially eligible students, inviting them to participate in reverse transfer.
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Transcript Exchange. Once a student consents to participate in reverse transfer, the university sends their electronic transcript to the respective community college, and the community college student information system reads the transcript.
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Degree Audit. Once the community college receives the transcript, institutional degree audits assess the degree against existing associate degree requirements.
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Degree Conferral and Advising. The final process involves conferring the associate degree to students who meet the degree requirements.
For more on reverse transfer and serving transfer students, be sure to pick up a copy of The Transfer Handbook: Promoting Student Success.