11/18/95

Bob Lowry (lowrygr@mail.auburn.edu)

(Editors: The following is submitted for your consideration as a possible op-ed piece)

TRANSFERRING CREDITS FROM JUNIOR COLLEGES TO FOUR-YEAR SCHOOLS

Less than one year ago, American voters swept Democratic lawmakers out of, and Republican lawmakers into, control of both houses of Congress. In part, this sea-change in the currents of national politics reflected a broad consensus among voters that decades of micro-management of their economic and social lives by big government had made them worse off.

The election of Democrat-turned-Republican Gov. Fob James (who ousted a sitting Democratic governor, the switch to the Republican Party by Sen. Richard Shelby, and the defections and impending defections of numerous other state and local elected officials from the Democratic to Republican Party suggests that Alabamians may be as sick, if not more so, of big government and the counter- productive welfare state as most other Americans seem to be. Let's hope so. In this regard, Gov. James has cast a critical eye towards the overbuilt system of higher education in Alabama. This is not inappropriate. He and other lawmakers concerned with inefficient government activity should look particularly carefully at the effects of a law passed by the Alabama Legislature in the autumn of the Folsom administration.

Under the terms of this law, passed with little fanfare in early 1994, representatives of the state's four-year and junior colleges currently are required to formulate by Sept. 1, 1999 what is referred to as a "uniform articulation agreement." This agreement mandates that "all applicable credits transferred from a two-year institution to a four-year institution shall fulfill degree requirements at the four- year institution as if they were earned at the four-year institution."

In practice, this law will provide a large subsidy to junior and community colleges in the state of Alabama. Although the costs of the subsidy are not obvious to a casual observer, this does not make the subsidy any-the-less-real or any-the-less disgusting to those who voted for political change in the hopes of reducing government-sponsored pork. Moreover, this law will tend to homogenize higher education in Alabama, making it more difficult for consumers to discern high quality educational institutions from low quality institutions. Not surprisingly, the most adversely-affected individuals are likely to be the students who enroll in Alabama's junior colleges; my findings suggest that their academic performance once they transfer to a four-year institution will be relatively poor, even though their junior college grades and transfer credit lead them to expect success.

The pork-barrel nature of this law is revealed indirectly by what was not voiced in support of the original bill. It was never suggested, to my knowledge, that forcing four-year colleges and universities to accept transfer credit for courses taken at junior/community colleges has academic merit for the students involved. That is, there is no reason to believe that the educational experience of a student who takes, say, principles of economics at the community college level and then transfers to a four-year school and enrolls in advanced economic courses, is any better than the educational experience of the student who enrolls originally at the four-year school and who takes both principles of economics and advanced economics in that institutional setting. Indeed, the implicit assumption made by those who favor the articulation agreement is that the academic experience of these two types of students is identical. This assumption permits proponents to conveniently focus on certain (politically) appealing features of the agreement, while assuming away the most damning flaw: there is considerable evidence that the educational experience of students in junior/community colleges does not measure up to that of students taking otherwise identical courses in four-year colleges and universities.

Recently, I completed an investigation of the academic performance of transfer versus "native" students at a major public university in a state that has an "articulation agreement" similar to the one recently mandated for Alabama. Specifically, I examined whether students who took their principles-level economics courses at a community college and then transferred into the four-year university performed as well scholastically in advanced economics classes as students who took those (ostensibly) same principles-level course at the four-year university prior to taking the advanced courses. I was able to control for many factors that influence academic performance in the advanced economics courses: academic performances in the principles of economics courses, transfer status, gender, race and SAT scores. Not surprisingly, how well a student performed in advanced economics courses is strongly related to how well (s)he performed in the principles of economics courses. In addition, however, I found that transfer students performed significantly worse in the advanced economics courses than did the "native" students.

One possible explanation of this finding is that transfer students need to adjust to the large-school environment of a major public university and that during this adjustment period, their academic performance suffers. Indeed, this social pathology has a scientific designation in the literature of higher education: "transfer shock." To test for the possibility that my findings reflected transfer-shocked students but not real differences in the educational experiences of students in the two types of educational setting, I conducted two additional analyses. First, I compared the academic performance in advanced economics classes of transfer students from other large, four-year colleges and universities against the performance of the native students. I found no differences. Second, I allowed for a semester's worth of "adjustment" for the socially shocked junior college transfer students before measuring their performance in advanced economics courses. I continued to find significantly worse academic performance among the transfer students than the native students.

There are not very many interpretations of my findings. Measured by SAT scores, the average student who matriculates at a junior/community college is not as bright as the average student who enrolls initially at a four-year college or university (keepers of the gate of political correctness just hate ugly facts banging at the bars). The fact that a junior college student is assigned a grade of "A" in principles of economics does not necessarily mean that (s)he understands economics as well as an otherwise-similar student at a four-year college or university who earns the same grade for that same course. It may reflect more lenient grading at the community college level than at the university level. My data confirm this interpretation. Controlling for a number of other factors, I found that transfer students' grade point averages for the two principles of economics courses were nearly half a letter grade higher than otherwise-similar native students' GPAs for the same two courses. What this means, of course, is that relatively easy grading at the community college level gives the (misleading) impression that students understand economic principles when, in fact, their understanding is not equivalent to that of students who take their economic principles courses at four- year colleges and universities; it is significantly lacking.

My findings suggest that someone ought to apply the brakes to the runaway freight train that this articulation agreement seems to have become. It is not unreasonable to suspect that findings similar to mine with respect to the academic performance of transfers students versus native students in economics classes would be revealed by analyses of students' performance in accounting, English, mathematics or any number of other subjects. Under the circumstances, by forcing four-year colleges and universities to accept full transfer credit for coursework taken at junior/community colleges, we may be doing a tremendous and deeply unfortunate disservice to transfer students. We may be setting them up for unexpected failure at the university level. That's what I would call real transfer shock.

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(Laband is professor and head of the Department of Economics at Auburn University.)

nov95:AU-articulation