Search EdWorkingPapers

Search EdWorkingPapers by author, title, or keywords.

Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due: Causal Impacts of Reverse Transfer Associate Degrees on Education and Labor Market Outcomes

Reverse transfer associate degrees are credentials retroactively awarded to current bachelor’s degree seekers that combine current four-year credits with credits previously earned at a community college. Providing students with an associate degree may not only increase motivation and persistence en route to completing a bachelor’s but may also provide important labor market benefits by way of increased marketability and earnings potential. Despite the proliferation of reverse transfer policies across at least 15 states to date, there is no causal evidence documenting their effect on students’ outcomes. Leveraging administrative data from Tennessee matched with records on its statewide reverse transfer program and a difference-in-differences design, we find reverse transfer degrees generally have little impact on students’ short- and intermediate-term academic and labor market outcomes. Our results point to suggestive yet small positive gains in GPA and short-term employment for recipients, but these estimates accompany no impacts on bachelor’s degree attainment and estimates that confidently reject any meaningful impacts on recipients’ earnings. Our findings contrast those of existing descriptive works on reverse transfer that reported large benefits for students, due in part to our methodological improvements and more robust data. These findings should guide policymakers considering the adoption, design, and ongoing operation of reverse transfer programs.

Keywords
Associate degrees, college GPA and credits, difference-in-differences, labor market employment and wages, reverse transfer, Tennessee
Education level
Document Object Identifier (DOI)
10.26300/dmvn-d795

EdWorkingPaper suggested citation:

Odle, Taylor, and Lauren Russell. (). Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due: Causal Impacts of Reverse Transfer Associate Degrees on Education and Labor Market Outcomes. (EdWorkingPaper: 22-569). Retrieved from Annenberg Institute at Brown University: https://doi.org/10.26300/dmvn-d795

Machine-readable bibliographic record: RIS, BibTeX