Unlike her friends and classmates, Sloan Hull didn’t want to attend a four-year college after high school. She knew she wanted to be a chef and chose Orange Coast College, a public community college near Los Angeles, for its culinary arts associate degree.
She graduated in December, and had planned to transfer to a top U.S. culinary school, until she realized the school would not accept her transfer credits, meaning she faced four years of about $40,000 annual tuition.
The Transfer Abroad Network, a new business based in California, offered another option. It helps U.S. community college students transfer to international schools to finish bachelor’s degrees. Ms. Hull saw a more economical path to a higher degree and the opportunity to study abroad.
Why We Wrote This
U.S. community college students sometimes face obstacles to finishing degrees, including credit transfer rules and tuition costs. Some overseas schools are drawing them by offering savings, as well as the study abroad experience.
TAN’s founders, Ashley Warmington and Emma Schwartz Lara, told her about a short summer program at the Business and Hotel Management School in Lucerne, Switzerland.
There Ms. Hull cooked with chefs, met students from around the world, and decided to enroll in a fast-track, one-year bachelor’s degree program. She is scheduled to start school near the end of August.
“I really never considered going abroad just because I had no idea that my credits could transfer,” she says.
Clearing a path
TAN started in late 2025, and launched with university partners for spring semester 2026. Programs are traditional two-year and one-year bachelor’s degrees for students who have their associate degree.
TAN’s founders say the platform streamlines the transfer process and includes specific transcript information, required classes, GPA requirements, costs, and financial aid information.
The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, which has been tracking a cohort of students who began community college in the fall of 2018, found that fewer than one-third of those students transferred to a four-year school within six years.
The reasons vary: curriculum mismatches, as well as unclear transfer rules, prerequisites, and GPA requirements. And U.S. higher education is among the most expensive in the world. The average tuition, not including room and board, for an in-state public four-year college last year was $11,371 and $25,415 for out-of-state, according to U.S. News & World Report. Private schools averaged $44,961.
TAN identifies schools outside the U.S. that offer accredited degrees, as well as those that accept U.S. government financial aid to students. U.S. community college students get a more affordable path to finishing a bachelor’s degree and the schools they partner with gain access to part of the U.S. higher education market.
A growing network
Today, TAN has partnerships with 20 schools in 13 countries, with 11 more schools in the onboarding process. These schools are in countries including Australia, New Zealand, France, Italy, Greece, Japan, the United Arab Emirates, and Spain.
“Emma and I both worked in international education for so many years. We would be helping students apply to go overseas and oftentimes there would be so many barriers along the way,” says TAN’s Ms. Warmington. She and Ms. Schwartz Lara both studied abroad and later worked as recruiters for international education and study abroad programs in Australia and the United Kingdom. They said that the hiccups to transferring were due to the administrative and admissions process and not students’ fault.
“Universities were just blocked off from connecting with this broader audience of transfer students that had amazing potential,” Ms. Warmington says.
Ms. Schwartz Lara adds that TAN knows that there is huge interest in it from the community they serve, but people are unaware of the opportunities and that it’s often more affordable than going to school in the United States.
Opening a U.S. market
There are no official statistics for how many community college students transfer abroad, but experts say the number is small. Only 1% to 2% of U.S. college students study abroad between four-year and community colleges, according to
NAFSA: Association of International Educators. Additionally, only 16% of students who start at community college transfer and finish a degree.
“It’s a big, wide-open field and there are a lot of community colleges out there,” says Beth Thomas, international officer for the Americas at Abertay University in Scotland, a TAN partner.
“Not all students will have the option to financially look at going overseas, so I think this will be a game changer for the right students,” she adds.
TAN helps schools like hers raise their profile with U.S. students, so it was worth her school paying the annual fee to join the network, she says. TAN said the flat fee does not change with enrollment size, but declined to say how much it is.
Ms. Thomas says that in the past her office would go back and forth with students about the correct materials to send, but now TAN handles that. Abertay accepts U.S. financial aid and offers scholarships to international students. Community college students interest her because she doesn’t want to miss nontraditional students who may have started school late or who have families. The biggest dividend is spreading awareness about Abertay.
“A lot of community college students wouldn’t think this is an opportunity that they can take advantage of,” Ms. Thomas says. “The more that they can do to raise that awareness to say, ‘This is an option for you, you can do this, you can go overseas and here’s how you do it,’ that’s fantastic.”
Tara Zirkel, director of strategic research with education consultant firm EAB, says that TAN could appeal to community college students because the pathway is predictable and clear. She says that recent high school grads who are unsure if they want to attend a four-year school abroad could be drawn to the idea of doing community college for two years and then going to Australia or the U.K. But they need to see that what they want to happen – for example, landing a job – is achievable, Ms. Zirkel says.
An equality of opportunity
Ms. Hull’s community college in Costa Mesa, California, was the first to work with TAN.
Greg Buie is the program facilitator at the school’s Global Engagement Center. He wants community college students to have study abroad experiences and to connect with the world in a way that their peers at four-year schools do.
“We want community college students to be able to have the same access to those types of learning opportunities and experiential, personal growth opportunities, so [TAN] is filling a need that exists,” Mr. Buie adds.
The platform is free for community colleges and students to join. He thinks that more students will begin to take advantage of it. Mr. Buie says that streamlining the process makes it easier for community college administrators and could result in substantial savings for students.
“That could be the difference between someone transferring at all or stopping at the associate level,” Mr. Buie says.
By transferring her community college credits and doing the one-year culinary bachelor’s program in Switzerland, Ms. Hull will pay a little more than a quarter of what she would have had to spend over four years starting from scratch at a culinary school in New York. She secured housing in Switzerland, got financial aid, and will complete a paid six-month internship that is built into her program. She hopes to one day be a private chef and own a brunch café.
“I think that going abroad is definitely a big risk to take, and I think that everyone should experience some kind of risk like that and go abroad,” Ms. Hull says. “I think that community college students deserve the same chance as anybody else.”