Most students who start at community colleges don’t plan to end their education there. Nearly 80% of them intend to transfer to a four-year institution and obtain a bachelor’s degree. But less than a fifth of students manage to do it within six years.

This week, the Department of Education released, for the first time, national data looking at which colleges are best serving transfer students.

In some cases, the transfer system breaks down. 

In 2021, Marissa Nicholson transferred from a community college in Wisconsin to a four-year public university in Texas. And she was pumped. 

“Packed everything in my car and just drove down here,” she recalled.

Nicholson thought it would be only two more years of school before she got her bachelor’s degree. But then she found out the majority of the courses she’d taken — including math and history — wouldn’t transfer. 

“The basic classes I took were useless,” she said.

Nicholson retook the classes that didn’t transfer, and she hopes to graduate with a bachelor’s in chemistry in 2027. But this experience is pretty common: The federal government estimates transfer students lose more than 40% of their credits on average when they move between schools.

It’s almost like students are going from one country, the community college, to another, the four-year institution. And the new one says, “Your money’s no good here. We don’t take those credits.”

“Sometimes you have a cultural reluctance to accept community college courses as being identical to what was taught at the university,” said James Kvaal, undersecretary for the Department of Education. 

He said the data released this week shows best practices to help students successfully transfer and complete their degrees. One takeaway? Institutions need to talk to each other, to say, “Yeah, this is what a freshman-level calculus class looks like.”

“Some things that colleges need to do include joint advising, making sure that community colleges and four-year colleges agree on what is being taught,” Kvaal said.

Another issue is that students — and their advisers — don’t always know where they’ll end up, said John Fink with the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College. 

That can make it hard to plan. 

“I think our conventional approach with transfer students, why we’re getting these low outcomes, is ‘We’ll just start taking courses at a community college and figure it out later,’ ” he said.

All this means it can take longer for students to graduate.

“It’s extra time. It’s extra money. And the longer it takes for students to graduate, the greater chances that life gets in their way, something goes wrong,” said Education Undersecretary Kvaal.

And, Kvaal pointed out, the U.S. badly needs more of these students to complete their degrees. That way, they can become the nurses and engineers and chemists we’re going to need more of in the future.