Community College a Good Economic Option
ARTICLE TOOLS
RSS
Digg
Del.icio.usStarting your college career at a two year community college can save a great deal of money on undergraduate coursework. But you do need to do your research first. When choosing this route, you need to find out if all of your credits will be transferable to the next school you plan to attend.
For students and their families, the savings can be significant. In California, in-state tuition at Santa Monica College for the most-recent academic year was around $600 for full-time students, compared to $7,551 at the University of California, Los Angeles. Add in room and board charges and the savings increases another $25,000 or so if the student lives at home for those first two years of school.
But transitions aren’t always smooth. College credits that don’t transfer can add to both the time and money spent at a new school. Many schools are tightening their belts as transfer applications rise, making it harder to gain admittance. And unexpected adjustment problems at a new school can impact grades, making it more difficult to get scholarships and fellowships for graduate school.
Going from a two-year community college to a four-year public school in the same state is a well-paved transfer route. Special arrangements known as “articulation agreements” can make the process fairly simple. These officially approved agreements match course work between schools so that students can transfer with little or no loss of credits. Although articulation agreements are most typical between community colleges and four-year public schools in the same state, they sometimes exist between community colleges and nearby private schools.
In tough economic times there are alternatives to a four year school. This way you can also take your time to get a feel for college classes and maybe even better nail down your course of study.
Warning: mysql_fetch_array(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in /home/rschliff/www/educouncil.com/public/wp-content/themes/educouncil/single.php on line 49
If you enjoyed Community College a Good Economic Option, please start a discussion by leaving us a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Editor: Melissa Steele is a freelance writer and focuses her research on funding for higher education. She is a graduate of UNLV and endeavors to keep her readers up to date with the most relevant education information.