When Aaron Rasmussen was growing up in rural Oregon, his performance on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery Test suggested he had potential as a director. But with four siblings and two parents living on a teacher’s salary, he also had limited means to pursue vocational training or higher education. Blue Mountain Community College was 34 miles away in Pendleton, Oregon, but 12 of those miles were covered in ice in the winter, which would have made travel difficult. Instead, he headed to Boston University on a Pell Fellowship. To help keep overall college costs down, he took summer classes at Blue Mountain, though he didn’t breathe easy until course credits successfully transferred to the Boston University.

The Armed Forces test was not wrong. Rasmussen is best known for co-founding MasterClass, an online course subscription platform where a wide range of experts and celebrities like Gordon Ramsey and Usher teach their craft through pre-recorded tutorials and lectures. He’s now the founder and CEO of Outlier, a company that produces college-level cinematic online courses with rockstar scholars like mathematicians. Hannah Fry and John Urschel. The courses, which cost $400 and award credit through the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, offer students the opportunity to earn college credit in general education courses intended for transfer to colleges. ‘origin.

“The potential is evenly distributed, but the opportunity is not,” Rasmussen said. “This is my chance to go back and try to fix what I lacked growing up and make it available to other people.”

This week, Outlier formalized a transfer network of 18 colleges, including the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Bellevue University, that “makes public and accessible the course equivalencies involved in transferring credit from Outlier.org courses to the institutions that are part of the network.” (Network institutions may have different course equivalency agreements with Outlier.)

The company is part of an emerging trend in which companies are choosing to partner with universities in an attempt to fix a broken system of transfer credit equivalencies. Too often, courses are not accepted for transfer credit, or courses are accepted but the credits are not applied to a degree program. Several of the companies operating in this field focus on technology designed to facilitate the transfer process, such as Transferology and AcademyOne. Companies such as StraighterLine and TEL Education are in the space that Outlier is looking to fill, trying to create lower-cost pathways for students to transfer to four-year colleges.

Among students starting at community colleges, low-income students are half as likely as their higher-income peers to have transferred to four-year institutions (24% versus 40%) and to have graduated a bachelor’s degree in six years (10% vs. 21%), according to a national student research center of 2021 report. The COVID-19 pandemic has made navigating traditional transfer options particularly difficult for disadvantaged populations, another Clearinghouse says. report. Institutional efforts to mitigate these challenges have been limited.

“It’s a big factor in the debt problem but without a degree,” said Anjuli Gupta, head of partnerships at Outlier. “We are creating an institutional response and transparency network that is truly student-focused.”

Outlier offers its courses in conjunction with the University of Pittsburgh’s Johnstown Campus, which provides students with a vehicle for credit transfer. (Pitt’s main campus initially provided its stamp of approval for the company’s courses.) The company also lists colleges and universities, including some highly selective institutions such as Princeton University and the University of California, Berkeley, which accepted his courses for credit, according to Outlier students.

But that list could be misleading, according to Janet Marling, executive director of the National Institute for the Study of Transfer Students at the University of North Georgia. Marling stresses that the decision of whether or not to accept transfer credit and whether it will count toward a degree program is up to the receiving institution. In addition, the decision whether or not to accept transfer credits is often left to the discretion of the heads of the university department concerned, which can produce inconsistent results.

“We have not been able to verify this claim,” said Michael Hotchkiss, director of media relations at Princeton, after some effort to verify the claim that Princeton offered its students course credit. Outlier. Instead, Hotchkiss pointed to Princeton Web page which lists its transfer credit criteria.

“The outdoor course must be offered by an accredited four-year institution,” the Princeton webpage notes. Depending on one’s perspective, this could be a gray area since the for-profit Outlier delivers the course while the University of Pittsburgh verifies it with a transcript.

Some universities, including the University of Massachusetts Amherst, are confident that Outlier courses are offered by an accredited four-year institution.

“Regional accreditation is the gold standard, and that ticks that box,” said Morgan Donovan-Hall, director of transfer admissions at UMass. We do not hesitate to accept these credits as if offered by the University of Pittsburgh. Donovan-Hall noted that the University of Massachusetts’ decision to join Outlier’s transfer network was consistent with its mission to “remove transfer barriers.”

But other institutions on Outlier’s list, including UC-Berkeley, are expressing concern about the accreditation status.

“Although we have accepted such credits [from Outlier] in the past, we don’t in the future,” said Janet Gilmore, senior director of strategic communications at Berkeley. “We discovered that the courses offered in the program are not documented in the University of Pittsburgh catalog. The University of Pittsburgh is an accredited institution from which we normally post credit. We will not be releasing any more credits from Outlier in the future.”

Since a host institution may change its policy at any time without notice, Outlier may not be aware of such decision.

To be fair, Outlier’s target student is more likely to attend a community college than Princeton or Berkeley, though Rasmussen acknowledged that highly selective institutions lend credibility to potential college partners.

Experts say companies like Outlier get important pieces of the transfer-credit equation. For example, Outlier provides students with a “Credit Transfer Toolkit” which includes, among other things, email templates on how to contact the advising service or the host institution’s registrar’s office about credit transfer.

“They let students know that they will have to take responsibility for contacting their host institution and give good advice on doing this early – before they commit to the course,” Marling said. Outlier’s new credit transfer network also promises to ease the burdens and worries of network students. Additionally, since the network relies on articulation agreements, a receiving institution would presumably need to alert the company to any changes in its transfer credit acceptance policy, avoiding situations like the one with Berkeley.

So far, companies like Outlier don’t seem to have adapted to the masses yet. When pressed for information on the impact, Rasmussen said they “tended not to be very public about their numbers” but the signups were “getting noticeable”. As the University of Massachusetts prepares to launch an Outlier partnership this fall, Donovan-Hall suggested that “20 students would be a good start.” She noted that the numbers are less important than the ability to “break down barriers that should have been removed a long time ago.” Outlier is one of several credit transfer pathways offered by the university.

Despite obstacles on the path to acceptance, for-profit companies partnering with nonprofit universities are helping advance an overdue conversation about reducing friction between transfer credits.

“This won’t be the last company we see,” Marling said. After all, Rasmussen may not be the only entrepreneur with an aptitude for filmmaking and a deep commitment to education.