It's unfor­tu­nate, yet true. Four years of col­lege study won't nec­es­sar­ily afford you a col­lege degree.

The first two years of college–whether at a uni­ver­sity or com­mu­nity college–tend to encom­pass "gen­eral edu­ca­tion" (GE) classes, con­sist­ing of lan­guage, writ­ing, speech, math and other basic require­ments before pur­su­ing upper divi­sion courses toward a spe­cific major. Some stu­dents gripe that it's an exten­sion of high school; oth­ers enjoy the tran­si­tion to col­lege aca­d­e­mics, espe­cially when the school tai­lors GEs to stu­dent interests.

But do GEs trans­fer from col­lege to col­lege? If you study your first two years at a com­mu­nity col­lege and plan to trans­fer to a four-year school, will they take all of your cred­its? To take it a step fur­ther, what if you start your major at one col­lege and try to fin­ish it at another?

Accord­ing to a com­men­tary piece today in the Chron­i­cle of Higher Edu­ca­tion, the credit-transfer sys­tem is pro­duc­ing more and more stu­dents who have an over­abun­dance of cred­its behind them, yet still no degree.

The arti­cle attrib­utes this grow­ing trend of Van Wilders (of National Lam­poon noto­ri­ety) to credit waste­ful­ness, inef­fi­ciency and inflex­i­bil­ity across the post-secondary insti­tu­tions. While those adjec­tives come off as abra­sive, they stem from a lack of atten­tion to this issue in gen­eral. Regard­less if an insti­tu­tion is pri­vate or pub­lic, depart­ments have their own pre­rog­a­tives when it comes to credit-counting and allow­ing extra­ne­ous classes to count for their carefully-thought-out major require­ments. More often than not, they'll reject unknown course titles to count for their own, famil­iar ones.

Say, for instance, a human­i­ties depart­ment at State School #1 has recently reviewed their phi­los­o­phy major and decided that the require­ments were too vague. Let's say they held sev­eral meet­ings, sur­veyed stu­dents and alumni, and ulti­mately revamped the require­ments so that all phi­los­o­phy majors must take at least one upper-division course from the fol­low­ing five areas: clas­sics, logic, meta­physics, reli­gion and a lit­er­a­ture course about a philoso­pher, offered through another depart­ment. This would apply only to incom­ing phi­los­o­phy majors, of course. So let's say everyone's happy with this new, re-focused approach to the major, and incom­ing stu­dents are excited about the cross-disciplinary require­ment, too.

But let's say… two years later, an incom­ing phi­los­o­phy major from State School #2 comes in with nearly all of the phi­los­o­phy major com­pleted… based on the old require­ments. State School #2 didn't revamp their require­ments. This stu­dent only needs one more semes­ter to grad­u­ate, or so she thinks. Unfor­tu­nately, State School #1 thinks not. Addi­tion­ally, State School #1 has a for­eign lan­guage require­ment for all human­i­ties majors, set­ting her back another semes­ter, at least.

What should State School #1 do? Lax its require­ments and grad­u­ate phi­los­o­phy majors who have not ful­filled the new require­ments? Make excep­tions for stu­dents who can demon­strate pro­fi­ciency in other ways? Say "too bad, so sad" and assign them an adviser?

Per­haps the stu­dent should have done more research on State School #1's phi­los­o­phy major require­ments, but nobody's per­fect. Fur­ther­more, stu­dents pay for their insti­tu­tions to serve them, not the other way around. Any­thing more is com­mu­nity service.

The Chron­i­cle arti­cle sug­gests that the same amount of national effort put into help­ing stu­dents get in to col­lege should be focused on address­ing col­lege credit chaos.

I sug­gest that col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties of course retain the right to alter their course require­ments in any way they see fit, but… that we should imple­ment a national stan­dard for stu­dents to peti­tion their exist­ing cred­its. We should stop mak­ing them feel like they're try­ing to shove square pegs into round holes. Per­haps a stan­dard­ized list of alter­na­tives can be imple­mented across the board, such as catch-up course offer­ings, inde­pen­dent study options, more test-out oppor­tu­ni­ties and other solu­tions for stu­dents who can demon­strate that they have jus­ti­fi­ably put in their time, just not under the cor­rect course title.

In my expe­ri­ence, it was pulling teeth to get depart­ment heads to accept out­side cred­its. I used aca­d­e­mic peti­tions I found online, bugged the hell outta depart­ment sec­re­taries, sched­uled meet­ings with chairs and deans, and even­tu­ally got some 6 units to count. But it seri­ously ate into my home­work time.

In another case, some­one very close to me com­pleted four years at a uni­ver­sity and then another four years at a com­mu­nity col­lege, nei­ther of which he was for­mally awarded a degree until he painstak­ingly fina­gled his require­ments to fit the mold. Granted, he attended col­lege for non-degree-related hands-on expe­ri­ence, but when push came to shove, his degree require­ments weren't met. I was shocked to learn that one of the most edu­cated peo­ple I knew had to fight for his eight years of col­lege to count for at least one four-year degree. As for the two-year degree? He doesn't qualify.