Last fall, nearly 1.2 million non-freshman undergraduate students enrolled in a new institution, with 500,000 of them moving from a two-year community college to a four-year institution. But transferring credits from one school to another can be stressful, particularly for community college students, who lose an average of 22% of their credits when moving to a 4-year college, according to a study by Congress’ Government Accountability Office. That credit gap can leave students scrambling to find the time and money to retake classes completed at their community college and presents a significant barrier to degree completion, research suggests. It also undercuts the role community colleges can play in reducing the cost of college.
The process is also a pain for overburdened transfer officers who must sift through student transcripts, compare syllabi and decide whether credit will be granted for previous coursework, and whether that credit can, for example, be applied to a college major. Moreover, they often must apply unclear and inconsistent rules that introduce a high degree of subjectivity into the process, according to a report published in June by the nonprofit education and social policy research group MDRC.
“What we’ve documented in a lot of cases, when students do transfer, is that a lot of the credits may be accepted by the university, but they’re not applied to the bachelor’s degree program,” says John Fink, a senior research associate and program lead at the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College. “Students might have to retake math because [some schools decide] you have to get a B in calculus at our university, instead of a B in calculus at the community college.”
But now, a new artificial intelligence driven platform, CourseWise, promises to take some of the drudgery and uncertainty out of the credit transfer process for administrators and could ultimately allow students to better plan their transitions, with fewer credits going to waste. The platform was developed by a team led by University of California Berkeley Associate Professor of Education Zachary Pardos and is now being tested in a pilot at 59 schools and six state systems, including the enormous University of California and State University of New York systems.
The test has broad support from the educational establishment, with the American Association of Community Colleges, the AI Transfer and Articulation Infrastructure Network and the National Association of Higher Education Systems, all participating in the pilot. The Council of Regional Accrediting Commissions in an October statement encouraged schools to fully integrate AI into their accreditation process, noting: “Current approaches frequently result in delays in students receiving necessary information as to how their credits will transfer, the need to retake courses, and other negative consequences for students. Technological advancements, such as AI, can help institutions improve this process.”
CourseWise facilitates the course evaluation process by highlighting established equivalencies between participating schools and suggesting new potential course matches. Driving the effort is a natural language processing model that goes beyond just keyword matching to detect similar course titles, descriptions, and syllabi between institutions. School administrators or transfer officers can then comb through the suggested matches and manually decide which ones to approve.
So far, the response from these schools has been overwhelmingly positive, says Angikaar Chana, the chief operating officer of Equivalence Systems LLC, the for-profit organization formed to deploy Coursewise. ”People feel more confident in the platform since it was built by a faculty member, instead of a company that is more corporate and might not understand the nuances of higher education,” he told Forbes. Research from his lab shows that their AI-powered approach performs at the same level as a human administrator, adds Pardos.
CourseWise’s growth strategy includes plans to beta test a student-facing planner this fall, ahead of its official launch early next year. Using the new tool, students will be able to upload their transcripts, map their academic history to equivalencies at their intended institution, and curate a personalized academic plan with the help of AI.
In many ways, CourseWise is similar to Transferology, a non-AI platform that maps out credit transferability across more than 400 partner institutions for students and advisors. But while Transferology only searches already established agreements between partner institutions, CourseWise applies AI to existing agreements to predict how other equivalent courses might be treated. That could open more transfer avenues for community college students and allow for better planning. “Once more of these articulations are possible and this data is more centralized, that will allow students to be able to go to one place and really say, ‘okay, where can I go’?” Chana says.
There are other approaches aimed at smoothing the community college to four-year college path. For example, state systems in California and Virginia have guaranteed transfer programs that enable community college students that meet certain requirements to earn admission to a four-year university. These partnerships between community colleges and four-year institutions “design the transfer experience from end-to-end” to minimize credit loss and other barriers for community college students, Fink explains.
But CourseWise could be a boon for students who don’t have access to such guaranteed transfer programs, don’t find those programs fit their needs, or who simply prefer to navigate the process independently. By analyzing equivalent courses it could switch “the default transfer credit evaluation from a ‘no’ to a ‘yes,’” says Fink.