The Impact of Reverse Transfer Associate Degrees on Education and Labor Market Outcomes

Abstract

Reverse transfer associate degrees are credentials retroactively awarded to current bachelor's degree seekers, combining four‐year credits with credits previously earned at a community college. Using administrative data from Tennessee, we use a difference‐in‐difference design to compare students before and after receipt of a reverse transfer degree to similar students over time. We find reverse transfer degrees have little impact on students’ academic outcomes (GPA, credits, and bachelor's degree attainment) and labor market outcomes (employment and earnings). Our findings contrast with existing descriptive work reporting large benefits of such degrees, due to our methodological improvements and more robust data. The null effect on earnings suggests that returns to an associate degree are driven by human capital gains rather than signaling in the reverse transfer student population.

"When Anything Can Happen”: Anticipated Adversity and Postsecondary Decision-Making

“…While earning an associate's degree and then transferring to a bachelor's program with a year or two worth of existing credit is possible in principle, actually earning a bachelor's degree on this path is rather rare (see discussion inOdle and Russell (2023)), so we do not incorporate this in the model.18 At T , agents receive 1 1−β times the utility of the average annual income earned by individuals with their particular degree attainment status.19 This is smaller than the full sample used in Section 3, but larger than estimation samples that require other covariates and outcome variables (Tables3-5), particularly because the state variables used to construct…”