Leaders of 4-Year Colleges Offer Views on Enrolling Transfer Students

I worked on the receiving end of the transfer process for about 25 years in AZ, and I can tell you that there is always something that university people would prefer to do than to facilitate transfer. In spite of that, Arizona has implemented a rather remarkable  transfer system that is about as seamless as transfer is going to get. It even includes a degree transfer process for the AAS that allows a AAS graduates to compete a bachelors degree at AZ public universities in no more that 60 semester hours.  And we have done this without locking down the curricula of all institutions.  While we do need to have course by course equivalencies to allow the transfer of individual courses or small numbers of courses, transfer can be facilitated greatly by getting beyond course by course transfer to degree transfer or block transfers of  general education or pre-major clusters of various kinds. The education and development of transfer students, as with our own lower division students is not achieved only in courses work but in the whole experience of succeeding in college. What upper division students need primarily are good habits of mind and behavior.