Credit Loss, Institutional Retention, and Postsecondary Persistence Among Vertical Transfer Students

Although community colleges have served as a gateway to universities for millions of students—disproportionately so for students from populations historically underrepresented in higher education—prior research has demonstrated that the majority of vertical transfer students lose at least some of their pretransfer credits. However, researchers examining how credit loss relates to subsequent college outcomes have been hindered by data limitations. For this study, we drew from the literature on academic momentum and examined the relationship between credit loss, institutional retention, and postsecondary persistence. Our use of novel administrative data from Texas enabled us to disentangle major credit loss from general credit loss and study the contribution of each credit loss type to posttransfer outcomes. Our analyses show that both forms of credit loss are inversely related to institutional retention, but the relationships between credit loss and postsecondary persistence are far less consistent. We found evidence suggesting that major credit loss is more strongly related to both retention and persistence than general credit loss. We did not find evidence that the relationship between credit loss and posttransfer outcomes is moderated by students’ race/ethnicity, economic status, or gender, and we found only limited evidence of moderation by major.