Click here for the article of Inside Higher Ed, June 23rd 2008.
Before becoming a DC think tank person, I worked for the Indiana Senate, advising the chair of the State Budget Committee. Much of this job consisted of listening to people ask my boss for money.
...The United States is an unusually large nation populated by a restless citizenry prone to moving from place to place. Our higher education system is also unusually diverse and decentralized, with thousands of public and private institutions retaining the academic freedom to decide what kind of course credits they’ll accept from whom. As a result, the basic logistic challenges of managing student transfer are considerable. It’s hard for a given college to evaluate credits from a huge number of courses, departments, and institutions nationwide...
The result — a chaotic, inefficient transfer “system” that’s hardly a system at all — makes life very difficult for students who attend multiple institutions, as more and more do. What’s worse, many students don’t find out how many courses will be accepted for credit until after they transfer, so they can’t take ease of transfer into account when they decide where to go....
...The flawed U.S. transfer non-system has also persisted because, historically, it was still better than what students experienced elsewhere. But that, too, is changing. As the Institute for Higher Education’s Clifford Adelman found in his recent report on the Bologna Process, universities in Europe are poised to leapfrog the United States in ease of transfer, based on a process of deep, concurrent analysis of academic goals, degree qualifications and credit systems that goes far beyond what a harried registrar’s office in a U.S. institution could hope to accomplish one transcript at a time...
The Times:
Comments