West Virginia makes it easier to transfer college credits

by George Hohmann for the West Virginia Press Association

About 200,000 West Virginians — 20 percent of the state’s adults — have some college credits but no degree and every year about 3,000 seek to transfer their credits, said Paul Hill, the state’s chancellor of higher education.

Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin thinks one path to improving the state’s last-place ranking in the percentage of residents with a college degree is to make it easier to transfer credits.

Gov. Tomblin focused on this in his 2014 State of the State speech. “College students across the Mountain State report problems with the flow of class credits between public institutions of higher learning,” he said. “This increases their financial burden and delays the completion of their degrees.”

The Governor, who challenged the state’s colleges and universities to resolve the issue, gets progress reports every month at meetings of the Workforce Planning Council, which he personally chairs. After a recent council meeting Tomblin said one of his greatest pleasures as governor is seeing state government department heads — people who spend millions of taxpayer dollars on workforce training — coordinate their efforts.

Hill, who sits on the council, said credit transfers hadn’t been formally addressed in a number of years. “You do hear stories from students who try to transfer but find it a dead end. They simply are told  their credits don’t transfer.” Read the full story >>