Turning Transfer Into Opportunity: Why We Built Explore

For millions of students, the path to a degree is anything but linear. It shifts with life circumstances such as a career change, a relocation, or a return to education after years away. Increasingly, colleges and universities are meeting these learners where they are, recognizing that transfer is not simply movement between institutions but one of the most powerful opportunities to expand access and strengthen enrollment.

Even so, the process itself has not kept pace. Students often have no clear understanding of how their credits will apply and the process to find out can take weeks. Staff spend hours navigating outdated workflows. Institutions struggle to connect early interest to meaningful engagement. The gap between aspiration and experience is significant, but it is also solvable.

This challenge inspired the development of Explore, an addition to the Stellic platform designed to bring clarity and scale to the transfer process from the moment students begin exploring their options to the moment they enroll.

Across the United States, more than 43 million adults have earned some college credit but no credential. In 2024, 1.2 million students transferred, representing more than 13 percent of all continuing undergraduates, yet nearly half of their previously earned credits are lost in the process. For students, this means lost money, repeated coursework, and significantly delayed graduation. For institutions, it results in missed opportunities to engage students who are motivated, interested, and often ready to enroll if provided with timely information and support.

These issues are rooted in legacy systems and decentralized processes. Transfer evaluation still depends on spreadsheets, manual data entry, and reviews that move through inboxes one email at a time. Students submit transcripts and wait, often for weeks, without visibility into where their evaluation stands or who is reviewing it. Staff spend countless hours routing information and following up across multiple offices. Leaders have no visibility into what prospective students are exploring or where interest is building.

The outcome is a process that feels reactive when it could be proactive, and opaque when it could be transparent.

Transfer is changing because higher education is changing. Several forces are converging to make modernizing transfer not just beneficial but essential:

• Upskilling and reskilling trends are accelerating, with more students returning throughout their careers for additional degrees or certifications and accumulating credit from multiple institutions along the way.
• Students shop around for programs and credentials as they advance their skills, comparing cost, program fit, and how their existing credits will count before they ever apply.
• A growing variety of enrollment paths is becoming common as students navigate flexible, multi-institution journeys that no longer follow a single direction.
• State legislation is placing greater emphasis on ensuring equitable, streamlined pathways for transfer students, pushing institutions to modernize how credits are evaluated and applied.

Institutions that understand these shifts know that transfer is not only growing but diversifying. The question is no longer whether transfer should be supported at scale, it is how quickly institutions can adapt.

We built Explore around three principles:

• Students need immediate, real-time information on their options to make the right choice before committing.
• Staff should have tools that automate routine work while keeping them squarely in control of decision making.
• Institutions should have the insight required to act on early student interest and shape enrollment strategy with confidence.

This required more than a new tool. It required unifying transfer work inside the same planning and audit ecosystem that guides students from orientation to graduation.

Explore gives prospective and current students a clear, real-time view of how their credits apply to programs of interest. With public program access, anyone can browse majors, requirements, and pathways, which is critical for students who are comparing institutions as they shop for degrees and credentials.

Using Explore’s OCR technology, students can upload transcripts or enter coursework manually and see, within minutes, how their learning applies to degree requirements. They can explore multiple scenarios, understand cost and time to completion, and evaluate program fit.

Once admitted, students can follow a transparent evaluation process that shows what has been reviewed, what is pending, and what has been approved. This clarity removes the uncertainty that often leads students to stop out or choose a different institution.

Explore provides staff with a centralized articulation workspace that replaces scattered spreadsheets and email-driven routing. Workflows and communication tools eliminate long email chains by automatically sending items to the right evaluators and keeping all discussions and decisions in one place.

The articulation engine matches incoming courses to existing equivalencies, flags exceptions, and applies institutional rules consistently. Staff can import equivalency tables, create new rules, and handle edge cases directly in Stellic without switching between systems.

Because Explore integrates with the campus SIS, final decisions sync automatically. This reduces duplication, prevents misalignment across systems, and removes the communication delays that previously slowed transcript review.

Transfer can be a powerful enrollment strategy, yet institutions often lack visibility into the earliest signs of interest. Explore helps institutions capture the interest and information of these learners from the moment they begin searching.

With Explore’s recruitment visibility dashboard, leaders gain insight into which programs attract the most interest, what academic backgrounds students bring, how close they are to finishing a degree, and which institutions consistently act as feeder schools where deeper articulation partnerships would have the greatest impact.

Explore offers a foundation for a modern transfer process—one that reflects how students learn today and how institutions must operate tomorrow. Partners using Explore are already seeing faster evaluations, more engaged prospects, and staff who finally have the time and clarity to focus on the work that matters most. Students gain confidence in their path and understand how their past work fits into their future goals.

Most importantly, Explore helps institutions future-proof their enrollment efforts. As more learners accumulate credit across institutions and expect seamless movement between programs, the schools most prepared to evaluate and apply learning quickly will be the ones that grow.