When CCRI students transfer, will their credits follow?

If it weren’t for his advisor, Tyler Jackman might not be graduating this spring from Rhode Island College (RIC).

The 25 year-old media communications student first attended Community College of Rhode Island (CCRI) before transferring to RIC in spring 2022 semester. Two CCRI classes didn’t survive the move — potentially delaying Jackman’s path to graduation, had his advisor not contacted the appropriate department head at CCRI to get the credits restored.

How does the transfer process work in Rhode Island? Or rather, how should it work? With only one community college, one public college and one public university, seamlessness might be assumed. 

State senators had hard questions. URI, RIC and CCRI presidents had no easy answers.

“If I’m talking about my experience with CCRI and RIC during the transfer, it’s probably going to be a bit of me talking a little smack about CCRI’s student outreach and advising game,” Jackman said in a phone interview. 

Jackman said a CCRI advisor — one who was not specifically assigned to him — placed him in five film studies courses, having mistaken them for media communications courses. Jackman consulted with a second advisor who noticed the mistake, and he was able to drop all the courses. But by then it was so late that most other courses were full. Jackman only managed to sign up for two of the media courses he needed, setting him back almost an entire semester. He eventually obtained his associate in arts degree in the fall 2021 semester.

The transfer process is important, as the end goal for 80% of community college students nationwide is an eventual bachelor’s degree, according to a report released in February by the Community College Research Center at Columbia University. But data from the same report shows not many reach their intended summit: Only about a third transfer to four-year schools, and less than half of those transfers finish their bachelor’s within six years of entering community college. 

As the state’s only community college, CCRI is often tasked with guiding students who suspect they want a four-year degree — but who might not know what they want to study. That was the case with Jackman, the editor-in-chief of The Anchor, RIC’s student newspaper. He didn’t know he wanted to study media when he entered CCRI. By the time Jackman graduates this May, it will have taken about six years for him to obtain his bachelor’s degree. 

“Overall, I spent six years in college when I discount the year off I took during COVID,” Jackman said via email. The slower pace was the result of focusing on work as well as confusion with classes, he said, noting he didn’t feel alone in that regard.

“A large amount of CCRI as a student body seemed to be those treading the water, getting-started-with-their-college-experience-type people,” he said.

CCRI opened a new department on campus last year to help smooth away bumps in the transfer process and make the process less opaque for students.

“It’s been around for a whopping eight months,” said Anna Battye, manager of the new Transfer Center, which is located in the field house of CCRI’s Knight Campus in Warwick.  “I’ve got two staff, and we do constant outreach to students to make sure they understand what they need to take.” 

Incoming CCRI Students can also drop in for advising and be assigned a “success coach,” said Battye. Coaches help students plan ahead for their time at CCRI. That includes taking introductory-level and general education courses, for example in English and math, that are designed to transfer easily. That way, even if a student isn’t initially considering a bachelor’s, they will have a head start on credits to make the switch. 

Advisors from both URI and RIC are present on the main CCRI campus weekly for an informational event called Transfer Tuesday.

“Occasionally they come work out of my office if they know they’re gonna be meeting with a lot of CCRI students , so we make sure that they aren’t just mythical creatures that you don’t see until you apply to RIC or URI,” Battye said. “We have them on speed dial.”

Key strategy: Choose transfer plan early

Some states have tried to make the transfer program as smooth and transparent as possible. The Tennessee Transfer Pathway, effective since 2011, virtually guarantees a student’s community college credits will transfer provided they follow certain steps. Virginia offers a similar program, and Mississippi also enunciates clearly how transfers between junior colleges and state universities work.

CCRI President Rosemary Costigan described Rhode Island’s program during her Feb. 7 testimony at a hearing before the Rhode Island Senate Committee on Education.

“The best bet for 100% transfer are these JAA [Joint Admissions Agreement] plans, and the student has to select which school they’re going to go to,” Costigan told legislators.

CCRI has a Joint Admission program that requires students to select a plan of study before they achieve 30 credits at CCRI. There are currently 97 JAA plans available to CCRI students, with more forthcoming. But Battye said that the approximately 3,500 students on “career track pathways” at the school can encounter some walls if they decide to switch lanes.  

“For students following a career track, it might be difficult to pivot last minute,” she said. “But most of the time, a student has been assigned to a student success coach, and they’re getting the kind of advising that they need to make sure that they’re choosing the right path for them.” 

Jackman noted that he’s “a little bit CCRI old blood,” having attended the community college from fall 2017 through fall 2021. He said he was unaware of the Joint Admission program until his CCRI studies were well underway.

“How things have changed in the last four years, I can’t tell you. But back then, yeah, you really had a bit of a struggle if you did not directly search for the services themselves,” he said.

That sentiment — and some of the same frustration — is echoed in online forums like Reddit. Threads from across the past five years contain both advice and lament on the process of transferring out of CCRI. 

In a thread from May 2019, one Redditor wrote: “I spent 3 years at CCRI and when I transferred to RIC they only accepted two of my classes from CCRI…I ended up transferring back to CCRI and spent 8 years in college for an Associates in Arts.”

“This is completely avoidable,” came one reply noting that colleges publish a list of compatible courses. 

Another user replied that they had double-checked which classes would transfer when they started at CCRI: “Not knocking you, but it’s not like a hidden secret or anything,” they wrote.

Still, two years later, in a thread from January 2021, a Redditor wrote that even though they were enrolled in the JAA program for computer science, they found RIC would not accept some of their CCRI credits.

Another person replied and noted that some of their own computer science credits did not survive the trip from CCRI to URI: “Unfortunately CCRI, URI, and RIC just want us to stay there for 10 years.”

The user recommended a page from Collegesource’s Transfer Evaluation System as helpful in minimizing the chance of wasted credits. Currently, CCRI recommends Transferology, a more streamlined and personalized tool also from Collegesource that checks course compatibility across institutions. The tool is free to use and anyone can sign up. Users are able to enter courses at one institution and then see a likelihood those courses will transfer over. 

Remedial classes in reading writing and math don’t count

One type of course that will likely never transfer over? Remedial courses. 

In May 2023, the Council on Postsecondary Education — the state’s regulatory body for higher education — amended a state policy setting the rules for how universities should accept credits from other schools. What remains on the books is the immobility of remedial classes, which only count at the schools where they were taken. 

“Credit hours earned in remedial or developmental courses are institutional credit and are not applicable to credit hours required for any certificate, associate or bachelor’s degree,” according to the policy.  

CCRI’s Associate Vice President of Student Affairs Amy E. Kacerik said some years have seen 40% of incoming students in need of one or more remedial classes like reading, writing or math.

“Yes, these are credits that don’t count toward a degree or transfer,” Kacerik confirmed. “So we’re spending a lot of time looking at how best we can support students to as quickly and effectively as possible get on track with college level courses so that they can earn their credential.”

An influx of remedial needs and transfer issues were both concerns for Sen. Lou DiPalma, a Middletown Democrat, at the Feb. 7 meeting of the Senate Committee on Education. DiPalma has been on the committee for 16 years.

And three years ago, Shannon Gilkey, the state’s postsecondary commissioner, said CCRI, RIC and URI would be neatly aligned in their acceptance of transfer credits. Gilkey testified on Feb. 7 that URI has a 97% alignment with CCRI. Roughly 70% of CCRI’s transfer students choose URI as their destination, Battye said. 

But the transfer process’ stitches can be more visible when jumping from CCRI to RIC. DiPalma asked both Gilkey and Costigan whether “every single course” a student takes at CCRI will be universally transferable by this June. 

“I do not believe so,” Costigan replied. “What you’re talking about is an associate’s degree that on its own is worth 60 credits, it transfers to a four year institution, and the student is a junior. So we are not there yet,” Costigan said.

To DiPalma, an engineer by trade, the issue is very much one about systems, and systems are made by people.

“I think the issue is, is people,” DiPalma said in a recent phone interview. “It’s not money standing in the way. I know, it’s time, but it’s the case where it’s taken us three years, and we’re not done yet…I look at it as basic blocking and tackling kind of stuff in higher ed. It’s not something, ‘We can’t figure this out because we haven’t done enough experimentation on nuclear fusion.’”