Boosting Transfer Student Success at CUNY

But despite the power of the transfer pathway to help lift low-income young adults into career success and economic security, the large majority of CUNY students who intend to transfer and complete a bachelor’s fall short of doing so. [...] Initially supported by grants from the Heckscher, Petrie, and Ichigo Foundations, the Articulation of Credit Transfer (ACT) project launched in 2020 as a joint effort of CUNY and Ithaka S+R, a policy research nonprofit, with the goal of boosting transfer outcomes by helping students transfer more of their credits from a two-year to a four-year program. [...] At the same time, CUNY will need to take additional steps of its own, such as creating Transfer Success teams at each college to harmonize transfer practices, improving data collection on the transfer student experience, and launching a new Transfer Academy to boost the knowledge of faculty and administrators around transfer policies. [...] Perhaps the best known challenge facing transfer students, the failure of credits to transfer from the student’s community college in a manner that counts toward their major in a four-year college affects a significant number of CUNY transfer students. [...] This initiative would invest up to $5 million in operationalizing and scaling up the effective practices identified through CUNY’s A2B program and across this report—from expanding and marketing the T-Rex tool and replicating the Articulation of Credit Transfer (ACT) initiative across the rest of the CUNY system, to seeding new Transfer Affinity Group and Business Academy models at the colleges th.