A National Solution

Learn about Reverse Transfer, how the Clearinghouse facilitates the exchange of course data nationwide to aid in student completion, and look into the data exchange process.

Video Transcript

Just a bit about Clearinghouse and our mission. The Clearinghouse has been around for just around 26 years now. We do service just around 97-98% of schools in the country have partnered with us predominantly for enrollment and degree reporting, but the Clearinghouse also offers several other products and solutions all geared towards serving the education and workforce communities and we strive to be a trusted data partner for you and all the related services that go with that. So we appreciate your partnership and look forward to building relationships with you going forward. Today, we're gonna talk about student mobility and I love this slide because it really shows all of the different ways that students are traveling and all of the paths that they're taking to get to the degrees that they're looking to attain or the educational goals that they have. And one of the things that were seeing just right off the bat when you look at student pathways is typically everyone associates two-year degree with an associate or two years of school with an associate's degree and four years of school with bachelor's degree but what we find really just looking if a student only matriculates in one school that it's taking right around three academic years for an associate's degree and right around four and a half for a bachelor's degree and once a student mobility takes place and the students are attending three or more schools you can see that that timeframe increases exponentially. So the student mobility, it's not necessarily having a negative impact on the student's education but it certainly is increasing their time to degree completion. We also know that the demographics of the typical bachelor's degree earner is shifting a little bit. So in 2014-2015, 37 % matriculated at age 20 or older that's almost 40 which is a lot actually considering when we think of bachelor's degree earners when they matriculate it just would be sort of right out of high school but they're actually not they're coming in as more adult students and we're also finding that 64% of bachelor's degree earners attended more than two institutions so what I would note with that is attended more than two institutions is actually taking out the dual enrollment population so that's two or more institutions after they turn 18. So, we are looking at an older population who tend to be far more mobile than the traditional college freshmen that we think of. We also know that students are stopping out so 40% of bachelor's degree earners had at least one stop out and 52% of associate's earners more than half of associate degree earners had at least one stop out so not only are students transferring to multiple institutions but they're taking breaks.

So a little bit of the statistics that look at the completion rates of those students. On average, if you took the entire freshman cohort who started at a community college from 2010 of that cohort, about 13% of them will go on to earn a bachelor's degree. Again that's not taking into an account like an applied science or versus like an associate's in arts or something like that. In general 13% of that freshman cohort who started a Community College will go on to earn a bachelor's degree within six years now if we took that cohort and we looked at those students who actually transferred to a four-year school which would be a pretty good indication that they were interested in earning a bachelor's degree about 32% of that freshman cohort that started at Community College is transferring out to a four-year school within six years. And of that 32%, 62% of them are transferring before they earn an associate's degree so they're transferring with no credential and with no associate's degrees earned at the Community College and that amounts nationally to about three hundred and fifty thousand students a year are transferring from a two-year to a four-year without a degree.

And then if we look at that population that transfers, only 42% of them, less than half, end up earning a bachelor's degree within a six-year mark. So I think that that becomes very relevant because if you have more than your students transferring without an associate's degree and less than half of that transfer population not earning a bachelor's degree we have a significant gap of students who are lending themselves to the some college know degree population of students. So in comes Reverse Transfer. And Reverse Transfer is an initiative that really aims to assist that mobile population of students who are transferring from a two-year population to a four-year school in gaining a credential and the way that Reverse Transfer works is if you take the credits that a student earned at their two-year school and then when they transfer to a four-year school while they're earning toward a baccalaureate degree if the four-year school transfers their coursework back to the Community College, the Community College can compile those credits and package them run degree audit processes and award a two-year associate's degree which is known as a Reverse Transfer degree. So we just went through a bunch of stats on mobility and increased time to degree completion but at the same time there's a national awareness and sort of this concentration now of an emphasis on improving student success metrics. So we've seen that 17 states currently have some sort of legislation on the docket to promote Reverse Transfer. Over 30 states have some form of performance funding and more of that is pending as well so and when we talk about student completion metrics a lot of times we're looking at completion rates, or retention rates, degrees earned, time to degree, things like that and reverse transfer is really something that can assist that but it's really not just from the two-year degree. What we've seen is that in credit when it's due with a grant that sort of started a lot of the reverse transfer movement but what they found is well it does have the ability to increase associate's degree completion by around 15%, they also found that it showed a very significant increase in bachelor's degree earners once the associate's degree was confirmed. There also was another study at University of Texas El Paso and El Paso Community Colleges where they found that their students were far more likely to earn a bachelor's degree once they received a reverse transfer degree than those who transferred from the two-year school and didn't earn an associate's degree. So and there's a lot of data out there to support this is just a couple examples, but we are finding more and more that reverse transfer has a positive impact not just on associate's degree completion but on bachelors degree completion as well.

Part of what might be aiding that is that after the students earn their associate's degree their earning potential for wages increases significantly and while that extra income might be used for education expenses, books, fees, housing. It also may be used for things like childcare or car payments, rent, things like that. So overall, you have a far more financially healthy student who's attending class which can lead to beat them being far more successful. And in addition to that those extra wages also have the potential to assist with student default rates. When we first started digging into these stats, I was really surprised to learn that the students with the lowest amount of debt have the highest default rates and students with the lowest amount of debt typically have attended community colleges and many times they haven't earned a credential. So reverse transfer has the ability to aid those students being able to pay off their debts which overall would decrease has the potential to decrease their default rates.

So, we're gonna switch gears now to talk about specifically how the Clearinghouse's Reverse Transfer process works. At a very very high level, we have... the way that the process is designed is that the four-year institutions would create an extract of their student course data. Now we do ask that the four-year school send this data at least twice a year. However, what we're finding when we work with four-year schools is that most of them are actually just building it into their grading processes and they're sending files to us pretty much every time they roll grades. So, when we get a file of course data from the four-year schools, National Student Clearinghouse takes that data and sends it through data validation processes, and we then will disperse the data to the appropriate two years institution. So, the four-year schools are sending one course file and then the Clearinghouse will will parse that out to the appropriate two-year school. The two-year school will then ingest the data and they'll run their degree auditing processes and confer a degree. When the two-year school submits their DegreeVerify file to the Clearinghouse, there's a Reverse Transfer flag in there that the two-year school would flag as this degree was awarded to Reverse Transfer. So Clearinghouse is notified which degrees in the DegreeVerify file are Reversed Transfer degrees and we then are able to provide some reporting back to the four-year institutions. That overall is sort of how the process works. So a lot of times schools will ask us well why would we need a national platform for reverse transfer? Oftentimes, especially when we talk about community college students, the perception is that they stay fairly local. Right. I am previously from the SUNY system and we always say you know we have very little bleed right that our students just stay within see system. But when we pull the data that's really not accurate. So when we look at data for out-of-state transfers, overall, about 27% of all transfers happen out of state, but around 19% of Community College students transfer out of state. Now that does take into account a lot of them aren't actually moving out of state although a significant portion of them may be especially in the Northeast. But a lot of them will attend large online institutions that happen to be located out of state. And then when you look at the Community College to private four-year, you're running at about eighteen percent. So if you're just working within the confines of your particular you know sender feeder arrangement, you're actually missing almost 40 percent of your reverse transfer population, which is a significant chunk.

A little more about some of the benefits of Clearinghouse Reverse Transfer. We are the only national solution to exchange course grade data for Reverse Transfer, which gives you the increased ability to support transfer student retention and completion rates. And this this product in general is geared completely toward alleviating workload. Reverse Transfer was developed by a group of registrars. So we really tried to streamline the process of exchanging course grade information specifically for Reverse Transfer. So it's you know one file submission for all of the community colleges that a four-year school would have to get together. So there's no need to send transcripts or sort through transcripts. Everything's just in one Reverse Transfer location. When you sign up for Reverse Transfer, you do get a consultation with folks from the Clearinghouse on best practices and different ways to set up Reverse Transfer. We also can help you with things like FERPA consent processes and because we have a large national network, we're usually almost always able to find a campus if you do hit a snag that you can work with. They can help you get up and running you will be assigned a dedicated implementation person. We'll help you get up and running. You know you'll know their name and email. You won't have to send questions to a generic help desk. And we have experience implementing pretty much every SIS platform out there. And then we do provide some reporting for both the four-year schools and the two-year schools about Reverse Transfer files and the degrees that are being awarded.

So I mentioned before, you'll have one standard file format in one central location for all of the data exchange for Reverse Transfer. It does eliminate the need to process transcripts, so it's just one extract that you'll submit to us. And again, that can include all of your transfer students anywhere across the nation. It doesn't need to be an articulation agreement that you have or a specific school that's waiting for Reverse Transfer information for you. We'll package it and disburse it appropriately.

And then we also give you the ability to sort of process Reverse Transfer on your timeline. So Reverse Transfer tends to be a little bit more of a casual product than some of the other enrollment or degree reporting where it's on sort of very defined time frames on your submission. Reverse Transfer allows you to upload the files when you have time to upload the files and for the two-year schools you have time to process all of your Reverse Transfer information on the designated time that works for you in your office. We do give you the ability to easily search and access one-off student records. So if you haven't gotten into downloading your Reverse Transfer files for a particular semester yet, we'll give you the ability to log in, search for an individual student and just look at their records specifically so that you're able to address them on an incoming basis. But again, there's no need for you to shuffle through transcripts trying to determine as the transcript delivers transfer or as the transfer is the student really coming in to take a class. Everything is in a very neat and confined Reverse Transfer platform and I will just note you know Reverse Transfer data you know clearing Clearinghouse is known for being a very trusted and secure place for all of your data so you you never have to worry about that with us.

A little bit about our file format. We accept course files in pipe delimited formats but we also have the ability for EDI and XML file formats through the SPEEDE server if you're more comfortable with that. And you can send or receive file formats in any way like. And I will just note too that the Reverse Transfer file utilizes the PESC TS130 transcript standards. If you're not familiar with that, so the PESC TS130 is a set of data standards for academic transcripts to be exchanged electronically and when we talk about transcripts being exchanged electronically, we're not talking about PDFs we're actually talking about a data upload from one SIS and then it download into another. And while there aren't a ton of schools that exchange information that way currently, certainly we know down the road that that will become more and more prevalent. The course file for Reverse Transfer utilizes those exact same standards. So it's very much in line with the industry standards and we've done that very purposely to make sure that any errors that you may encounter with this course file are the same errors that you would encounter should you try to send an electronic transcript. So most of the SIS is are set up to handle that data upload very well and I will also know that these files we typically don't see very many errors with them because we utilize a standardized set of data so typically for us the most common error that we would see is like an invalid OPEID number that you may have sitting in your system but other than that it's a pretty easy file to send to the Clearinghouse. I know a lot of times when we talk about sending files to the Clearinghouse everybody automatically goes to error checking, but really these files are very clean and they tend to be fairly painless.

A little more about the file features. For the schools that are receiving data, we do give you the ability for a few customized data filters. So the two-year schools actually have the ability to say to limit the students that they receive based on the total number of credits they earned. So some community colleges will say the minimum number for an associate's degree is 60 credits so don't send me any students unless they have a total earned 60 credit hours. Other schools will say show us everybody who's got 50 credit hours because we may want to reach out to them to let them know what coursework they may need to complete their associates degree. Other two-year schools have said you know what we've really found that the best bang for our buck on awarding associate's degrees is 75 credit hours so don't show us any students until they hit that threshold. So you do have the ability to limit the amount of students that come in to your files that way. The file also supports exchanging core competency or general education requirements flags. And we know that you know there are a lot of students that have GERs. So you can flag those courses as meeting requirements and also the file facilitates the exchanging of updated student contact information. Which, for the two-year schools, can be invaluable information as they're you know looking to award their degrees and let the students know what they have left to take. So we do support that as well. And this is the data elements that are in the course grade file. You can see which ones are required and which ones are optional. I will point out the contact information, the core competency flag. There also is the course description in there so that's something as well a lot of two-year schools really appreciate, but in general you know this is the data elements and if you go out to the Reverse Transfer website, you can see those all listed in the implementation guide as well.

The other thing that I will note about Reverse Transfer, which may be the best part of about it is a free service here at the Clearinghouse, you do need to be signed up for DegreeVerify and EnrollmentVerify, which also both offer free services for campuses. And the reason why you have to be signed up for those is because some of the verification processes that we use in the files the file processing ping degree and enrollment verify. So, for instance, if a four-year school sent a file for to a Community College when we do our validation process and we actually ping our DegreeVerify database and we'll remove the student if they'd previously earned an associate's degree. So there are things like that. So we do you do need to participate in DegreeVerify and EnrollmentVerify, but otherwise Reverse Transfer is a completely free service with no no strings attached.

And that's all I had for today. Thank you so much for joining us today. Please contact us if you have any other questions or would like more information.