Why aren't transcript reviews automated?

[sanantone]

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.

They probably haven't seen transcripts from a tenth of the schools in the U.S. Among the schools they have seen, the transcripts they've received likely don't come close to having all the courses.

TESU and the other two have been around since the 1970s. I had a lot of credits that weren't in TESU's PLA database. The Big 3 will never gather enough transcripts to justify spending money on an AI program that can do such a sophisticated task. These schools will probably be closed before they see transcripts from half the colleges out there, which would mean that humans will still be reviewing most of the transcripts. 

Colleges and universities do keep a database of the courses they've reviewed. TESU's PLA database is largely based on courses they've seen from other schools.

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There's also more to reviewing transcripts than matching course codes in a database. A school may not have been accredited or regionally accredited in a semester listed on the transcript but is accredited now.