Why aren't transcript reviews automated?

[ss20ts]

Every school has human review of transcripts. There are around 4,000 colleges and universities in the U.S. plus an unknown number of universities around the world. Each school has hundreds to thousands of courses.

Which seems like an awful waste of time to me.  The first time a student transfers in from Whatever U., those courses should be added to a database along with the associated local equivalency.  When another student from Whatever U. transfers in, an automated system should compare the records from what was captured by the admission of the first student and then flag those classes that aren't already in the database for manual review.  Upon that review, those courses would also be added to the database.  Over time, as more schools and courses are added to the database, the process should become a lot more efficient and flags for manual review should happen less frequently.  If the school wanted to be strict, maybe add an aging field to review how a course transfers in every 3-4 years to make sure the originating college is still meeting the standards of the local college, but that would still be a lot less manual overhead than how things currently work.

There's a flaw with this logic. Courses frequently change. Sometimes far more often than every 3-4 years. I just had to submit a course syllabus for a course to transfer to EC from CSU. Course numbers also change all the time. Keeping track of that is a great deal of work and would still need to be done by humans. Many colleges still send paper snail mail transcripts as well.