Earn College Credits Fast and Cheap
Whether a student is still in high school or graduated, it's a great idea to earn some cheap college credits that can later be transferred to college and applied to a degree. Here are some steps and options to consider.
- Which type of college are you interested in enrolling?
If you already know which colleges you are interested in, go to their website, click on the search bar and look up "transfer credit" or "CLEP" and it should bring up the page that describes their policy on what kinds of alternative forms of college credit they allow and how much of each kind. Most schools fit into one of these categories below.
- Colleges that allow you to transfer in 30 credits of AP, CLEP, DANTES - most state and selective private schools. This means you will essentially only be able to test out of all or some of your general education requirements, i.e. freshman year.
- Colleges that allow you to transfer in up to 75% or more of credits
- Each one is different in how they specify what you can transfer. But, I have divided the types of credits up into tiers to show how common it is for colleges to accept them.
- Tier 0: Regionally Accredited (RA) college courses from other schools --- all schools accept this.
- Tier 1: AP, CLEP, DANTES -- most commonly accepted
- Tier 2: ACE approved courses + Tier 1
- Tier 3: NCCRS approved courses + Tier 2 and Tier 1 options
- Tier 4: Nationally Accredited (NA) college courses