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Graduation for UNM transfer student Kelsey Flint-Martin will be a bittersweet occasion.
While Flint-Martin will be able to move on to graduate school, she said she’s tacked on an extra $2,500 in school expenses — a semester’s worth of tuition she did not expect to pay.
According to Admissions and Recruitment Services, Flint-Martin is one of 1,300 undergraduate transfer students attending UNM this fall, many of whom have experienced similar credit transfer issues.
Flint-Martin transferred to UNM in fall 2010 from Wells College in New York. She said the difficulties she encountered when transferring credits held her back from graduating within four years.
“It took over a semester to get my transfer credits in the system correctly, so I couldn’t take simple things like the right English and math classes,” Flint-Martin said. “I have to graduate a semester later; they had me take extra classes that they ended up using my transferred credits for afterwards.”
Flint-Martin said that aside from credit issues, she was brushed aside when approaching advisers with questions.
“They (advisers) were slow on getting back to me; any questions I had they were just really, really slow,” she said. “All of the advisers I saw were dealt for freshmen, never for transfer students. I felt pushed aside.”
UNM student Michelle Dyer Peterson transferred to the University in 2008 after studying for two semesters at Brigham Young University-Idaho. Peterson said that because her previous school was religion-based, a few credits she had earned couldn’t be used for credit when she transferred.
Peterson said that while she understood why a few religion courses were not considered, she said her world religions credit was wrongly dismissed. She said she tried to use the world religions course she took at BYU-Idaho as an equivalent course to the course offered at UNM, but was unable to.
“I was basically denied of having that backed up because it was from a religious school, they said there was a religious slant to our curriculum,” Peterson said. “I told her that wasn’t the case, that ‘No, this was a class where we learned about other religions, not ours.’”
Peterson said she hopes to graduate in December, a year later than her original goal. She said the University should take a closer look at which transferred credits it accepts.
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“I think a lot of the time they just look at the title and say ‘Oh, we don’t have anything called that, so we’re not going to let that be accepted,’” she said. “I did have one class, though, I took an acting class at BYU-Idaho and I had my syllabus with me still, so I took it down to the theatre department and the guy in charge said ‘Yeah, this is exactly what we do in our acting class here, so I’ll accept it.’”
Director of Admissions and Recruitment Services Matt Hulett said issues with transferring credits is the most common problem transfer students encounter. He said credit discrepancies often occur because colleges and universities can have different requirements for degrees.
“When you go from (one college or university) to the other, there’s always some potential that the work you have done may not transfer to the new institution’s academy or program,” he said. “There’s always going to be those problems.”
Hulett said the University’s transfer course list, which can be found on the Admissions and Recruitment website, can help prospective transfer students find out which courses can be transferred to UNM. He said students can use LoboTrax, a degree completion audit system, to track their credits and figure out which courses will count as credit for their declared major and how that affects their potential graduation date.
“The list … does a pretty good job of showing what students have transferred from the past and how they’ve been counted as credit,” he said. “That, combined with their academic adviser, should help set an efficient course towards graduation.”
