О, парочка свежих статей про трансфер в NYT
College, My Way
With so many students moving among its campuses or arriving from community colleges, the California State University system now requires students to take at least nine specified advanced courses in their final two years. San Jose State, where a third of the 22,000 undergraduates are transfers, demands that those advanced courses be taken on its campus, not at another Cal State branch. And it is creating a transfer-student version of the general education program now required for all incoming freshmen.
A professor teaching a higher-level course, for example, cannot count on all the students having read the same books or learned the same material if some have taken the prerequisites at a community college.
"There's the question of whether someone who is just taking these courses to get them out of the way is really learning," says Carol Geary Schneider, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. "They're trying to get through their education with the greatest efficiency, and as a result, they're just cobbling something together. They're not following a curriculum."
The Transfer Student Nightmare...
Colleges vary greatly in how they welcome — or don't welcome — the transfer of outside credits. Alexander C. McCormick, senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching at Stanford, notes that a willingness to accept transfer credits typically "correlates with the stature of the institution." Not surprisingly, a top private college is pickier, not wanting to put its name on a degree if too many credits are earned elsewhere. Many colleges limit how many they will apply toward a major.
Certainly colleges are cooperating more, though. Twenty-six states now spell out rules for transferring course credits among their public institutions, according to a 2001 report by the Education Commission of the States. And some private institutions — about 50 in Illinois, for example — have joined in the agreements. The most seamless transfers are in states like Florida, where public institutions have adopted a common numbering system.