For a variety of reasons, many students require more than four years to complete an undergraduate degree.  These delays are due to many factors, including the transfer process between a community college and a four-year college or university, during which students can lose previously earned credits.  As a result of transfer, students often complete many more credits than would be required because full articulation is not evident or students do not have the benefit of transfer counseling.  Recently in Arizona, Hezel Associates found the benefits of an articulation and transfer model that go beyond student achievement—research found students to be more efficient in their studies and beginning to graduate with fewer credits.  In a state that, this fall, will begin to penalize students for accumulating excess credit hours to earn their baccalaureate degree (by charging them a tuition surcharge for credits beyond 150), the cost savings associated with this improved student efficiency may actually save taxpayers money.

Trying to avert institutional delays, many states have established policies that require articulation among all state institutions—or at least between all two-year and all four-year state colleges.  The marks of an effective transfer and articulation system are ease of transfer and improved progress toward earning baccalaureate degrees.  The Arizona Board of Regents (ABOR) and the state board of directors for community colleges established a Transfer Articulation Task Force in 1996 to bolster Arizona’s articulation system and improve student access to the state university system.  The resulting transfer model hinges on “a dynamic set of processes and agreements” between the community colleges and public universities. 

In the recent evaluation of the transfer and articulation system by Hezel Associates, we assessed the effectiveness of the various components of the transfer system (the Arizona General Education Curriculum (AGEC), Transfer Pathway Degrees and common course matrices), to analyze perceptions of the key stakeholders about the system and the academic success of transfer students based on available data. 

To accomplish these objectives, the Hezel team conducted a series of five surveys, facilitated eleven focus groups, and analyzed statewide transfer student data from the Arizona State System for Information on Student Transfer (ASSIST) database, a longitudinal database with some 55,000 student records.  While the analyses found that the Arizona transfer system was working well and was functioning as a tool and system exactly as intended, it was the results of the ASSIST analyses that were most interesting.

Among a number of findings from the ASSIST analyses that showed that transfer students who utilize components of the transfer system (the AGEC, in particular) are generally more successful than those who do not, we also found that transfer students are completing their baccalaureate degrees with fewer credits than they were five years ago.  Holding all other variables constant, students from each succeeding year graduate with almost two and a half fewer credits than those from the year before.  Over the five year period this equates to about 12 credits, or an entire semester.  Thus, the development and implementation of Arizona’s articulation and transfer model has helped to reduce the number of credits transfer students need for graduation which in turn saves taxpayers money and, ultimately, improves the educated workforce.