DETC Credit Transfer News

Copy from Michael P. Lambert, DETC Executive Director

Everyone will be happy to see that nationally accredited schools won a victory in the Senate for transfer of credits. The Senate voted 95-0 on new language that, while not ideal, makes it much harder for colleges to discriminate against students based on the accreditation source of previous credits. This bill still has to clear the House, but this is a clear victory for schools like Columbia Southern University.

Success in the Senate on Transfer of Credit

We are delighted to advise that on July 24th 2007, the full Senate passed, 95-0, the Higher Education Amendments of 2007, S. 1642, its version of reauthorization of the Higher Education Act (HEA). With the vote, the Senate revised the troublesome, objectionable language on credit transfer that appeared in the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee-passed version of the bill on June 20th.

The new language about credit transfer approved today represents a significant victory for DETC and all the nationally accredited institutions.

The Committee-passed version of the bill would have encouraged, or at least arguably permitted, colleges and universities to openly discriminate against credits earned at institutions accredited by national accrediting associations like DETC. But the final bill passed today contains new language we can live with: it now simply requires institutions of higher education to publish a statement of the criteria established by the institution regarding the transfer of credit earned at another institution.
While this new, “neutral” language does not include the famous CHEA principle on credit transfer, it does eliminate the prior wording that seemed to authorize, if not encourage, student transcript discrimination. We would have liked the Senate to have gone farther, and take up the cause of prohibiting the monopolistic institutional practice of refusing student transcripts based solely on the source of accreditation of the sending institution. However, the bill approved today certainly is not objectionable, and is a vast improvement over the June 20th Committee-passed version.

Our warmest thanks and congratulations go out to all DETC leaders and their students who took the time to write their Senators. Your letters, e-mails and calls made an impact on the Senate offices, and no doubt contributed to the improved language in the final version of the bill today.

Still, the battle for equity in credit transfer is not over by any means!

The House plans to draft and consider its own version of HEA reauthorization legislation, and this issue will doubtless be re-visited. The same arguments will be trotted out: Federal intrusion into academe versus fairness to students; academic independence versus student access and mobility.

You will recall last year, when House considered similar legislation, it accepted the highly objectionable Souder amendment that would have permitted and encouraged credit transfer discrimination. The powerful lobby groups—representing the nation’s most elite universities—who pushed for the Souder Amendment will be showing up on the House side of Capitol Hill again this summer with the same arguments as before: “Keep the Federal government out of academic decisions on credit acceptance.”

So please turn your attention—and your students’ attention—to your Representatives this summer, and let’s make sure we keep getting the message to them: it is not acceptable for colleges to be able to deny credit transfer based solely on the source of a sending institution’s accreditation.

We have a genuine victory in the Senate, but we have a long way to go before this will be over.