As access to higher education improves, the traditional path—four years at a single institution, culminating in a bachelor’s degree—is becoming less and less the norm. Students, including those with work or care-giving responsibilities, are getting credits in a plethora of ways, including dual enrollment, prior learning assessments, and military and corporate training. They’re also more likely to move between states and schools: 45% of associate degree holders and 67% of bachelor’s degree holders now have transcripts from multiple institutions, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
But it’s taken for granted that these students will lose credits along the way. The Government Accountability Office estimates that transfer students lose 43% of their credits when they switch schools. It’s a major reason that the transfer pipeline is so often described as “leaky.” And it’s an extra burden on the very students who are more likely to take a non-traditional path: socioeconomically disadvantaged learners, who may find that credits that they’ve worked for and paid for suddenly count for nothing.
Now, researchers from Ithaka S+R, part of the educational non-profit ITHAKA, are saying that it’s time for a change. 
Dr. Sarah Pingel, senior researcher at Ithaka S+R
“We don’t just have to accept that students lose progress when they move around,” said Dr. Sarah Pingel, a senior researcher at Ithaka S+R.
Pingel is the lead author of a new issue brief are advocating what it calls “holistic credit mobility”—a fundamental shift in the way that institutions and policymakers interact with students and each other.
At its core, holistic credit mobility means that learning is the central determinant of student progress towards a credential, not where or how the knowledge was gained. If a student knows something, Pingel and her co-authors argue, it shouldn’t matter whether they learned it in community college, a dual-enrollment program, at work, in the military, or somewhere else. The student should receive credit for what they know without having to pay to repeat learning.
