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Earned Credit Could be Lost Credit

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Richardson and Knight did something almost nobody does: they pulled transcripts and degree audits from both the sending and the receiving institution and traced each individual credit from high school through to a bachelor’s degree. Following 60 engineering transfer students in Virginia, they found credit falling out of the pathway at every stage, including at the very start. More than half of the AP and dual enrollment credit these students earned in high school was never used toward anything. The credits that survived were the ones the degree actually required.

Who published it
AERA Open, 2024
Authors
Amy Jo Richardson and David B. Knight
What it is
Peer-reviewed study
Where the data comes from
Virginia

What it found

  • At one of the two community colleges, 47% of the students had earned dual enrollment credit, and 88% of those students lost some or all of it in the transfer process.
  • At the other community college, 12% had earned dual enrollment credit, and 20% of those students lost some or all of it.
  • More than half of the AP and dual enrollment credits these students earned were never used.
  • The unused credits were mostly humanities, fine arts, and social science, in a degree that requires few of them.

What it does not show

  • Sixty students in one engineering pathway at one university. It maps how credit is lost; it does not give a national rate.
  • The authors expect students in non-STEM majors to use more of these credits, but they did not measure that.

How the study was done

Transcripts and degree audit reports from two Virginia community colleges and one research university, covering 60 engineering transfer students in a National Science Foundation grant program, through fall 2023.

Why this matters to a family

A credit that transfers and a credit that counts toward the degree are two different things, and which one your teen gets depends on the major they end up in.

Sources

Rules change. These were checked September 2026. Confirm the current version with your school before you act on any of it.

About FastTrack Advising

. FastTrack Advising works on dual enrollment and nothing else. We help families choose college courses a high schooler can take now that will still count toward the degree later, we check every course against the transfer rules of the colleges they name, and we stay in the picture through registration so the plan gets used. When the answer for a student is to wait a term, we say that too.

Reading the evidence before a decision?

Save this page and it sits on your own My FastTrack page alongside your state's deadlines and the tools. Deciding which of these findings apply to one teen, in one state, aiming at particular colleges, is what a roadmap engagement settles.

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