The College Transfer and Articulation Network: How are These Statewide Policies and Bilateral or Dyadic Partnerships Structured Across the United States?

Abstract Every academic year, millions of college students change institutions before degree completion, confronting the challenge of validating credits across colleges. Despite state-level efforts to legislate strategies for smoother transfers, actual credit recognition relies on non-state-regulated bilateral partnerships that are more (i.e., articulation agreements) or less (general transfer partnerships) specific as policies or guides to avoid credit loss. This study comprehensively sheds light on the USA nationwide structure of transfer and articulation agreements by focusing on statewide policies and in-state and out-of-state informal bilateral partnerships as units of analyses. The spatial configuration of both statewide policies and institutionally driven partnerships enabled testing for economic spillovers as well as measuring whether distance is a factor that may impact the formation of these partnerships. Data were retrieved from CollegeTransfer.Net (N = 18,260 partnerships and 1163 colleges), the Education Commission of the States (118 statewide policies), the IPEDs, and the US Census Bureau. Findings at the state-level revealed economic spillovers in two of four statewide policies, highlighting greater structure of program-specific articulation agreements over general transfer partnerships (i.e., agreements that do not require program continuation). Regarding institutionally driven agreements, the analyses indicated that general partnerships were the most prevalent form, which, compared to more structured articulation efforts, may be less effective in the avoidance of credit loss. We also found that shorter distances are a significant but impractical partnership-forming factor, for the average distance reduction among partnering colleges is 30 miles across models. Combining state and institutional datasets, we found that neither individual nor combined statewide policies actively predict institutional partnership formation. All databases and code created (statewide policies: https://cutt.ly/uwHyvkWQ , institutionally driven agreements: https://cutt.ly/7wHtPkEA , replication codes: https://cutt.ly/JwGRmVDu , https://cutt.ly/EwG1VbaW ) may be used in future analyses to address questions of transfer effectiveness and transferring financial costs, which although important go beyond the scope of our study.