Hoosier students at both the high school and college levels will soon have their academic transcripts converted into a common digital file as part of a yearslong initiative to better manage — and share — educational records.

Indiana’s Commission for Higher Education (CHE) met Thursday to discuss the effort that has been ongoing since 2005.

The Indiana e-Transcript Program, which is administered by CHE, was initially focused on sending high school transcripts electronically to colleges and universities in Indiana and other states. It has since evolved to include the sending and receiving of college transcripts, too.

More than 90% of the state’s high schools are already on board. Upwards of 200,000 transcripts are sent by secondary schools each year, of which about 75% are being sent as data files.

A recent survey of the state’s colleges and universities shows headway in the transition to digital, but some postsecondary schools still lag behind.

“The exchange of college transcripts is so critical in many ways,” said Ken Sauer, CHE’s senior associate commissioner and chief academic officer.

He said that’s especially true for students earning the Indiana College Core in high school, where it’s typical for those students to take dual credit courses from multiple institutions. Without a cohesive transcript, students and administrators are forced to request and process a variety of different documents.

Ditching paper

Prior to 2005, all transcripts in Indiana were printed on paper and sent through the mail. That process is expensive, time-consuming and increases the chance of human error, CHE officials said.

The General Assembly responded with the e-transcript program in 2013, creating a standardized, electronic transcript that high school students send to schools and employers.

Lawmakers emphasized that individual high schools that have their own transcript program can cause confusion for students applying to higher education or employment. Education officials across the state agreed that a transition to e-transcripts will eliminate that confusion and make it easier for students to apply to any college through one uniformed transcript.

CHE is charged with administering the program and contracts with Parchment to host the transcript-sharing platform. A common, electronic high transcript is now required, aligning data fields needed for college admission.

Seeing success with the high school-to-college program, state education leaders said it was time to focus on a standard, digitized college-to-college transcript.

In February 2022, the Commission passed a resolution calling for all college transcripts within public institutions to be exchanged as data files. The resolution indicates that all college transcripts should be exchanged electronically as XML data fields.

Commissioners originally aimed to have all Hoosier colleges and universities transitioned by 2024, but some schools reported that they will not be able to meet that goal.

Getting everyone on board

CHE’s latest survey of Indiana’s public postsecondary institutions requested the status of plans and current practices for sending and consuming transcripts as data files.

The results, presented at CHE’s Thursday meeting, showed that Ball State is not currently sending transcripts as XML data but is working on doing so by February 2024. The school already receives e-transcripts from high schools and other higher education institutions.

Indiana State is also not currently sending the common digital transcripts as XML data, though the school has a target goal of October 2024. The university is not currently accepting transcripts as XML data but aims to do so by March 2024, according to CHE.

Ivy Tech Community School was the first institution to send all college transcripts electronically and is already sending all documents via XML. The school said it’s ready to accept and process college transcripts in the same format. Sauer said Vincennes University is doing the same for incoming and outgoing transcripts.

All Indiana University campuses are additionally sending and receiving transcripts as XML data.

Purdue’s West Lafayette campus is not yet sending e-transcripts as requested by CHE, but university officials said they hope to do so by Spring 2025. The Purdue Fort Wayne and Northwest campuses’ transcripts are sent through the flagship office.

Further, none of Purdue’s campuses are accepting transcripts as XML data. The Fort Wayne campus aims to do so by January 2024, while the West Lafayette and Northwest locations plan to do so later in the year.

Purdue University Global, however, is not sending or accepting the e-transcripts and currently has no target date or definitive plan to do so, Sauer said.

The University of Southern Indiana isn’t sending or taking in transcripts as XML data, either, but said it would do both in 2024.

He noted that slowdowns at most institutions are caused by IT staffing needs.

Benefits ‘are many’

CHE officials maintained the benefits of exchanging all high school and college transcripts as data files are many, including cost savings to students and more timely consideration in the admissions process and in transferring credit administrative efficiencies for institutions.

The move also creates a helpful database for conducting institutional research on student persistence and completion, Sauer said. That could boost the Commission’s ability to administer state financial aid programs and to conduct state-level research.

Parchment CEO Matthew Pittinsky noted in a presentation Thursday that traditional academic transcripts “just have courses and credits and grades.” He said the transition to e-transcripts opens the door for more context to be provided for specific degree qualifications, competencies and skills that can’t be captured by paper.

“It really began with this initial idea, which is, it makes no sense to have the public high schools in Indiana printing transcripts, which are just data sitting in their student information systems, that they have the mail to colleges, who also have a student information system,” Pittinsky said. “They’re going to take that paper, they’re going to digitize it — they’re going to take the data out. This is an incredibly inefficient and insecure way to move educational data from K-12 into higher education.”

He said the same principle applies to university transcripts, as well. E-transcripts help students avoid “fragmented credentials” — meaning students are required to return to their high schools, colleges and licensing boards to get verification of their education.

Eventually, he hopes to see an even greater shift to e-wallets, where “lifelong learning and employment journey information” are collected and managed in one place.

“We’re working to actually innovate the record itself, break down the barriers between transcripts, diplomas, certificates and badges and really create a comprehensive record that I think is going to be much more useful — not just for academic reasons — but also for employment reasons,” Pittinsky said. “It just makes sense. It saves money. It’s more secure. It takes the friction out and unlocks opportunities like direct admission, where you now have a more seamless access to the academic record.”

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The bill, LD , sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Eloise Vitelli (D-Sagadahoc),  the Senate last month and was approved by the House. The bill was set to face a final vote in the Senate before advancing to the desk of Gov. Janet Mills. 

As amended, LD  requires that upon request from a student, a postsecondary educational institution must provide a transcript or diploma without mandating a repayment plan by the student unless they owe $500 or more at a 2-year school or $2,500 or more at a 4-year school. 

“Transcript withholding currently stops many students from transferring credits from one school to another, or holds graduates back from employment because they cannot access their diplomas. Enacting this bill would strengthen Mainers’ connection to higher education and alleviate barriers on the path to the workforce,” reads a  authored by student leaders of Maine Student Action and delivered to administrators at University of Southern Maine, University of New England, Bates College, and the University of Maine Orono.

This practice, the petition continues,“stifles the growth of aspiring students and muddies the short and long-term plans of those seeking to enter the workforce.” 

UNE student Victoria Kavanaugh, who said she emailed the petition to campus administrators, found “an overwhelming sense of support” from her classmates and peers on this issue.

“Transcript withholding can prevent students from transferring credits to other schools, applying to graduate or applying to jobs following graduation,” Kavanaugh told Beacon. “As a social work student, transcript withholding could also prevent me from applying for a licensing exam after graduation.”

USM student Samantha Donley, who last week delivered a petition to the office of school president Glenn Cummings,  earlier this month sharing her experience with transcript withholding. 

Donley said that in March 2014 she had to withdraw from UMaine Farmington due to health reasons and had an outstanding balance of $1,200, which she was gradually paying off. 

“I was ready to get back to school that fall, but I had a hold on my account because of the outstanding balance. I couldn’t reenroll, and I had no access to my transcript, which meant I couldn’t transfer my credits – which I’d already earned and paid for – to another school,” Donley wrote. “My progress toward a degree was indefinitely delayed.”

Donley goes on to explain that such stories are not unique, adding that “for too many Maine students, especially those with low incomes, transcript withholding is a trap.”  

In addition to supporting the bill, Donley and other students are asking their schools to “make its implementation possible.”

This  first appeared on , website and podcast created by the Maine People’s Alliance to highlight the experiences of everyday Mainers, share information about the political and policy processes that affect Maine people and promote a progressive worldview based on community, fairness and investing in the future.

James Smith missed his final housing payment to the University of Massachusetts Amherst when he spent a year there in an exchange program on his way to a degree at the University of Minnesota.

Strapped and with his family struggling financially at the time, he promised to pay off the $2,000 balance as soon as he could. But then collection fees were added and, because of a clerical mistake, he was charged an additional amount owed by another student with the same name.

Smith gave up. In response, the university refused to release his transcript showing the credits he had earned and paid for during his time at UMass. To make up for them, he had to take a crush of extra courses back in Minnesota — the maximum allowed without requiring additional tuition — until he had enough to graduate.

“It definitely made for a pretty horrible year and a half,” Smith said about the impact of a policy he called “both stupid and shortsighted.” In the end, he said, “UMass never got its money, and I had to repeat a year of college because I was broke.”

Stories like this are emerging nationwide in response to under which students are prevented from obtaining their credits and degrees because they owe even small amounts of money to the universities and colleges they attended.

Critics call it “transcript ransom.”

Nearly all higher education institutions withhold transcripts from students who have even the smallest of balances, according to the higher education consulting firm Ithaka S+R, which has estimated that about 6.6 million Americans are blocked from obtaining their transcripts or degrees because of unpaid bills.

But some institutions are changing this policy as they recognize the huge impact — and very bad optics — of withholding transcripts, a practice that almost exclusively affects low-income students. Anger over this has only grown at a time when many families are suffering through the financial fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In the most significant development, Southern New Hampshire University has now stopped blocking transcripts; it says it is has begun releasing these records to the 2,257 students from whom they were withheld over the last year alone because of unpaid balances that average $728.

SNHU has an enrollment of around 150,000, most of it online, a spokeswoman said, which makes it one of the nation’s largest single nonprofit providers of higher education.

The university doesn’t know how many students in all have been blocked from obtaining their transcripts over the years, though the registrar, Deanna Bechard, said there are four file cabinets in her office filled with degrees awaiting payment. Under the change in policy, all will now be sent out as soon as graduates’ addresses can be found.

Since the start of the pandemic, “we were getting more and more concerns from students because they owed money, and how can they pay us if they can’t get a job,” said Bechard. “As we thought about the student experience, we were thinking, these poor students went through four years of their education, and now they can’t get their diploma because they have a balance?”

As for whether withholding transcripts encouraged people to pay their debts, Bechard said, “It was marginally successful and ‘marginally’ is probably a strong word. The only thing it really did was prompt a conversation between the student and our accounts receivable department. It didn’t make them write a check.”

Philander Smith College in Arkansas announced during commencement ceremonies that it would forgive all outstanding balances for the classes of 2020 and 2021 — which came to about $80,000 — avoiding students’ degrees from being blocked.

“If you’ve got a balance, know that your balance is no more,” . He said the gesture was “in the spirit of doing all the good we can.”

In Massachusetts, where transcript withholding has come under particular scrutiny, the chairman of the Board of Higher Education is publicly questioning the policy, and the board has ordered state colleges and universities to report back about how many students are affected. Data previously obtained from the institutions by The Hechinger Report and GBH News shows .

“Some of these students are in difficult personal situations,” the chairman, Chris Gabrieli, said. The fact that so few of these balances have been paid off “does not inspire one that the hold process is a powerful tool. I think it’s the other way around,” since blocking transcripts often prevents would-be graduates from transferring, going on to graduate school or getting the jobs they need to pay their debts. “Students should be able to have their transcripts they need to advance their agenda.”

Gabrieli, who is also a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, wondered aloud why entire transcripts are being withheld if students owe money only for a single course or a semester, or for library fines or parking tickets.

“It’s an odd thing to say their fully paid-for past semesters aren’t theirs,” he said.

One Massachusetts school, Bunker Hill Community College, dropped its transcript withholding policy in response to the reporting by Hechinger and GBH. Another, the University of Massachusetts Boston, said during the investigation that it held transcripts for overdue balances in any amount; afterward, however, , and it would withhold transcripts only for unpaid bills of $1,000 or more.

A measure working its way through the Massachusetts legislature if they owe money to a public university or college. California last year became the first state in which public and private higher educational institutions were of students who have unpaid debts. A new Washington State law requires that students who owe money be allowed to get their transcripts in order to apply for jobs. And a coalition of advocacy groups in New York is pushing for legislation there like California’s.

One Michigan resident was inspired by this burst of attention to resume his fight with his former university over a debt it said he owed for a course he never took.

Desmond Wright-Glenn registered for the course at Wayne State University in 2016 but then learned that, after fees he hadn’t known about were added, his scholarship wouldn’t cover the full cost. Wright-Glenn concedes that he never canceled his registration, but also says he never logged into or attended the course. Still, he was charged for it in full, and when he couldn’t pay, his transcript listing all the other classes he’d completed was withheld.

“Other than that transcript, I had no way of substantiating that [education] other than my word,” said Wright-Glenn, who had hoped to go to graduate school. “It shut me down. I at that point was living paycheck to paycheck and didn’t have $1,400 to give them” — the amount the university said he owed.

His career plateaued, he said; even to get promoted at the long-term care company where he worked, he needed to provide his transcript.

Seeing news coverage of other students trapped in the same situation, Wright-Glenn, now 36, sent emails about his case in late March and early April to every member of Wayne State’s board of governors, his legislators and the governor of Michigan. A few days later, he got an email from the university bursar’s office telling him that his bill had been rescinded and his transcript would be released to him.

“I’m not sure whose ear I got in,” Wright-Glenn said. “I think it wasn’t a good look. Maybe someone said, ‘Did this seriously happen, and are we seriously charging someone for nothing?’ ”

Although its administrative procedures manual , a spokesman for the university said exceptions “are sometimes made on a case-by-case basis.” He said transcripts are released upon request to prospective employers even if there is a hold on a student’s account.

Now, in addition to finally applying to graduate school, Wright-Glenn is considering starting an advocacy organization for other students who can’t get their transcripts. He’s already toying with a name: Free the Grades.

“I feel like I won, but then there are 6.6 million other people out there who haven’t won, who don’t have my tenacity,” he said.

Other students have stepped forward with similar accounts. One who was studying toward a degree to become a special education teacher had her transcript blocked when her financial aid ran out and she couldn’t pay for a summer course she’d taken.

“My life has been at a standstill for years,” she said. Meanwhile, “I’m still paying student loans for a degree I’m not allowed to have.”

That’s a story Vivé Griffith hears often as director of outreach and engagement for the Clemente Course in the Humanities, which offers free classes nationwide to low-income adults to encourage them to go, or go back, to college. Many are prevented from doing so because they have unpaid bills and can’t obtain the transcripts listing the credits they’ve already earned.

“These are people who are 35 or 45 and they went to college when they were 18,” but never finished, Griffith said. “They leave us, and they’ve got confidence and skills about continuing on in school, and then they hit a complete dead end.”

In many cases, students want to pay their debts but can’t. The money they owe started to pile up during a financial emergency or because of unanticipated expenses.

“It’s important to recognize that there’s a difference between willingly and knowingly accruing debt versus something happening,” Griffith said. Besides, she said, “people are much more likely to get this debt paid back if they can get degrees and make more money.”

Bechard, at SNHU, pointed out that “even reversing this policy is not wiping the balance these students owe. It’s giving them an opportunity to get a job to pay the bill.”

Smith, now 49 and a lawyer in California, still reflects on his experience with UMass.

“I recognize I’m a lot luckier” than many others who have been through the same experience, he said. “I didn’t have to drop out of school. I didn’t have to take a hiatus. I was able to finish and get a degree. But I basically had to repeat my sophomore year of college because of this.”

Universities’ blocking of transcripts appears financially self-defeating and sometimes reads like bureaucratic parody.

Thomas Tarowsky went back to the campus of his alma mater, West Virginia University, for a meeting in 2014 and got a $20 parking ticket. Soon after that he received “a rather terse and pedantic letter” from the university telling him his academic transcript would be withheld until he paid the fine.

Tarowsky was 65 at the time and a retired college dean.

A WVU spokeswoman said it “value[s] each member of our university family” and invited Tarowsky to get in touch about his case.

For his part, Tarowsky said that not only has the ticket remained unpaid, “but I have not and will not contribute to the alumni association.”

This story about was produced by , a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, in collaboration with GBH News. Additional reporting by Kirk Carapezza. It is published here in partnership with . Sign up for our .