California’s higher education systems must make credit transfers easier | Opinion
California’s community colleges and public universities are intended to function as a connected system, so students can transfer between campuses while maintaining steady progress toward a degree. But for too many students, that promise collapses the moment they try to apply their transferred credits at a new campus.
The reason is simple: The University of California, California State University and California Community Colleges don’t share an understanding about what counts as college-level learning. Credit evaluation varies not only from campus to campus, but often between departments within the same institution.
What satisfies a requirement in one may be rejected in another.
Recent research on learners’ experiences underscores how fragmented the system is. Hundreds of credit transfer rules exist, yet many still evaluate credits student by student. Major requirements shift frequently, prerequisites change and departments change stipulations about courses that must be taken “in residence.”
The result? A bureaucratic maze that leaves students hanging.
To address this, lawmakers are considering Assembly Bill 2236, which would require community colleges, CSU and UC to create a streamlined, transparent process ensuring that commonly numbered courses count after students transfer. Whether or not a course counts for credits would hinge on a single, straightforward benchmark: Do at least 70% of the learning outcomes align?
The bill would also require systems to make these decisions public; establishing a process that is predictable, transparent and focused on students moving forward. This essential first step will position California to make other overdue improvements that help learners receive evaluation decisions more quickly.
Presently, credit evaluations can take up to 24 weeks, which is a lifetime for students who have neither time nor money to waste. Many must choose where to enroll before knowing how their coursework will be counted or how many requirements remain. Staff turnover can delay the process even further, compounding students’ frustrations.
These breakdowns carry real academic and financial consequences. Students can find themselves in the wrong courses, paying to retake classes they already completed, taking courses out of sequence or overloading their schedules to catch up. Each misstep adds time and costs.
For students balancing work, family responsibilities and tight budgets, those added costs can be decisive.
Students who lose credits lose time, confidence and sometimes the ability to finish. Extra semesters mean more work hours, more child care challenges and more chances for life to intervene. In a state where transfer pathways should be a cornerstone for educational and economic mobility, inconsistent credit recognition undercuts that promise.
The financial cost alone is staggering: Analysis by the RPK Group estimates that California transfer students pay an average of $5,860 in extra tuition when previously earned credits aren’t accepted or applied. Taxpayers also shoulder that burden, contributing over $147 million per student cohort for courses they shouldn’t have to retake.
The heart of the problem is how subjective credit evaluation remains. With no consistent standards, decisions are left to individual departments and faculty whose judgment may be colored by assumptions or biases — for example, that coursework from a particular college isn’t “up to our standards,” or that online classes are inferior.
Simply put: If what a student learns elsewhere is largely aligned to content covered in a course, then that student should receive that credit. California built one of the most ambitious higher education systems in the world on the idea that learners who enter through any door should be able to earn a bachelor’s degree.
Ensuring that prior learning is counted based on what students know and can do — not on where they happened to learn it — is one of the most practical and immediate steps the state can take to make that promise real.
Joshua Hagen is vice president of policy and advocacy at The Campaign for College Opportunity, a nonprofit that champions student-centered higher education policy transformation and the dismantling of inequitable systems to eliminate inequities and achieve racial equity and economic justice for Californians. Juana Sánchez directs the Beyond Transfer initiative on behalf of Sova, a national technical assistance firm. Beyond Transfer is a national initiative to improve transfer, credit mobility and recognition of learning in order to achieve equitable outcomes.
This story was originally published April 16, 2026 at 5:00 AM with the headline "California’s higher education systems must make credit transfers easier | Opinion."