The Transfer Maze

For decades, higher education has been talking about fixing transfer, and yet students still get tripped up, lose credits, and fall through the cracks, even among colleges that seem like they should be a tight fit. While many people think of public institutions as a kind of interlocking system, transfer students painfully come to learn that American higher education is not really a system at all, but a patchwork of competing entities. The barriers hide in the granularity, where bureaucratic inertia meets institutional self-interest — in the enrollment strategies of the university and its academic departments, in the attitudes of individual faculty members, in the individual interactions between advisers and students, and in the compatibility of something as seemingly inconsequential as course names and numbers.