The City University of New York celebrated the start of the Spring 2025 academic semester with the rollout of CUNY’s Transfer Initiative, which enables students currently transferring for Fall 2025 to move anywhere within the 25-college system without sacrificing credits toward their major. The new system creates consistency on what students across CUNY campuses need to learn in the first half of their major and is expected to save students an average of $1,220 in excess credits.
The loss of credits between community colleges and four-year institutions is a national crisis. On average, students lose a fifth of their credits during the process, wasting their scholarship dollars and making it more challenging to earn a bachelor’s degree. In 2023, CUNY’s Board of Trustees passed a resolution charging the University with fixing the broken system.
“Spring is time for new beginnings, and we are excited to start this semester with new efforts to support our students as they grow personally, professionally, and academically,” said CUNY Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez. “The transfer overhaul will save our students time, money, and frustration as they move from our community colleges to senior colleges. I’m grateful to our Board, my team, and CUNY faculty for tackling this massive undertaking to benefit our students and the city.”
On January 21, CUNY automated a CUNYfirst process that shows students how their existing credits transfer after being admitted to another CUNY college. This automation is part of the University’s comprehensive effort to take the burden off of students as they transition between schools. Previously, each campus had a point person who made this change manually for each transfer student after a student was admitted, requiring students to advocate for themselves when there were delays and adding stress as they were working to make important academic decisions about their future. In its first day of operation, 18,850 students could see their transferred credits before deciding which CUNY school to attend.
For more than 75% of students transferring anywhere within the system, they will carry over most credits in their major. The University tackled the six most common transfer majors first – accounting, computer science, biology, math, psychology, and sociology – ensuring credits transfer retroactively and will work to align 100% of majors next.
“CUNY’s new transfer system breaks down the barriers which students nationwide have long experienced when transferring between colleges,” said CUNY interim Executive Vice Chancellor and University Provost Alicia M. Alvero. “This initiative is the result of collaboration between faculty, staff, and students to make sure that our transfer students are supported throughout their academic journey. We hope that this effort can serve as a model for other institutions of higher education that are looking to remove barriers that prevent students from succeeding in college and beyond.”
“CUNY’s transfer initiative is a singular step toward improving educational opportunities for our students. It will accelerate their progress toward a degree and a more rewarding, successful life,” said Lubie Grujicic-Alatriste, Professor of English and Applied Linguistics, University Faculty Senate executive board member and co-chair of the CUNY Transfer Initiative. “The prior barriers to our students wishing to further their education have been removed by the team at CUNY and UFS working together to the benefit of students. The new, uniform system will create a smooth transition, validating all of their prior earned credits and allowing transfers to progress toward a degree just as all other students would. I am honored to have been given an opportunity to co-lead this project, which has been the most inspirational and rewarding project in my career thus far.”
“As a faculty adviser, I’ve seen firsthand how the transfer process was frayed and took the power away from students. The power to choose their path and the power to realize their potential. Solving it was a matter of fairness and equity, and we owed it to students to deliver on this promise,” said Samar El Hitti, Associate Professor of Mathematics and 2024-2025 Faculty Affairs Transfer Success Fellow. “I’m proud to be a part of CUNY’s continuing effort to bring faculty together to reimagine the transfer process and look forward to seeing the reach of this work on students across the entire University.”
An Intractable Problem and Innovative Solution
Each year, approximately 15,000 CUNY students transfer from a community college to a four-year program. But because transfer decisions were solely based on course equivalencies rather than learned competencies, many students had to retake the same courses, accumulate unnecessary credits, and lose progress toward their major. Such roadblocks served as a significant deterrent to upward mobility and student success. These obstacles date to the era before 1961 when the City’s colleges were integrated into a single University system but variations in course requirements at each campus remained, effectively penalizing transfer students.
Over the course of two years, thanks to strategic funds from Gov. Kathy Hochul and the legislature, CUNY and the University Faculty Senate brought together hundreds of stakeholders across departments and campuses to create seamless transfer paths, deciding what core competencies students needed in the first half of each major. For instance, an accounting course at Borough of Manhattan Community College and Baruch College traditionally may have covered slightly different material, leading to credit loss despite having the same class title and covering the same student learning objectives. Through collaboration, more than 300 courses, or blocks of courses, are now universally equivalent to each other across all colleges.
| From BMCC to: | Before | After | ||
| Baruch | 50% | 75% | ||
| Brooklyn | 63% | 84% | ||
| City College | 75% | 100% | ||
| College of Staten Island | 55% | 91% | ||
| Hunter | 75% | 100% | ||
| John Jay | 73% | 86% | ||
| Lehman | 60% | 100% | ||
| Medgar Evers | 83% | 100% | ||
| Queens | 68% | 86% | ||
| CUNY SPS | 100% | 100% | ||
| York | 83% | 100% | ||
| (Before and After: The percentage of psychology credits taken in years 1 & 2 that would transfer for a major from BMCC to other CUNY colleges) | ||||
The problem is not limited to CUNY. According to the Community College Research Center, for every 100 students entering community college, 31 will transfer to a four-year institution and only 15 will complete a bachelor’s degree. The problem is acute for underserved students, with the same study finding that just 10% of lower-income students who began at a community college earned a bachelor’s degree in six years.
To examine the crisis on a national scale, the American Council on Education (ACE), the major coordinating body for the nation’s colleges and universities, five years ago created a national task force focused on improving transfer and award of credit practices to spur student success and reduce the time it takes to graduate. Chancellor Matos Rodríguez, who now serves as ACE’s board chair, was a member of the task force.
The City University of New York is the nation’s largest urban public university, a transformative engine of social mobility that is a critical component of the lifeblood of New York City. Founded in 1847 as the nation’s first free public institution of higher education, CUNY today has seven community colleges, 11 senior colleges, and seven graduate or professional institutions spread across New York City’s five boroughs, serving more than 240,000 undergraduate and graduate students and awarding 50,000 degrees each year. CUNY’s mix of quality and affordability propels almost six times as many low-income students into the middle class and beyond as all the Ivy League colleges combined. More than 80 percent of the University’s graduates stay in New York, contributing to all aspects of the City’s economic, civic and cultural life and diversifying the City’s workforce in every sector. CUNY’s graduates and faculty have received many prestigious honors, including 13 Nobel Prizes and 26 MacArthur “genius” grants. The University’s historic mission continues to this day: provide a first-rate public education to all students, regardless of means or background.
By CUNY Communications
