Improving Graduation Rates in the Two-to-Four Pathway to Bachelor's Degrees

Abstract In the United States, transferring from a two-year program to a four-year program has become an increasingly important route toward a bachelor's degree. However, the pathway has an extremely high attrition rate. Utilizing two recent institutional reforms in the University System of Georgia, I show that allowing community colleges to offer bachelor's degrees and consolidating institutions increase two-year students’ bachelor's degree attainment by around 3 percentage points, which represents a 20 percent improvement. Both reforms increased two-to-four transfer rates, and institutional consolidations also increased bachelor's degree attainment, conditional on transferring. Moreover, I find evidence that reduced loss of credits during transfer is the driving force of the improvements. In particular, the reforms reduced credits lost during transfer by around 36 percent.