A-G and CC Course Requirements: What I Wish I’d Known As A Parent Of A College-Bound Teen
The coffee ring on my son’s 10th grade course selection sheet was still wet when he pushed it across our kitchen table last March. “My counselor said I need to double-check my A-G credits if I want to apply to UCLA,” he said, picking at a crumb of leftover granola bar. “And the summer CC course I want to take on modern US history counts for that, right?” I stared at the grid of letters and course codes on the page, half the terms a total mystery. I’d graduated high school 25 years earlier out of state, and the only thing I remembered about graduation requirements was needing four years of English. All this A-G and CC talk sounded like a new alphabet soup I hadn’t signed up for when I became a parent.
I texted three friends with older kids that afternoon, and only one of them could explain what I was looking at. She told me A-G is just the set of course requirements the University of California and California State University systems mandate for admission. If you’re missing even one credit in any of the seven subject areas, your application gets tossed out automatically, no matter how good your GPA or test scores are. CC, in this context, is concurrent enrollment courses at local community colleges, which most high school students use to fill A-G gaps, get ahead on requirements, or free up space in their senior year schedule for electives. That was the first thing I got wrong: I assumed CC courses in high school were only for kids who struggled or weren’t going to a four-year university. Turns out, more than half of college-bound kids in our district take at least one CC course before graduation.
I carved out 30 minutes during my work lunch break a week later to meet with my son’s counselor, Ms. Lopez, to sort out his transcript. She pulled it up on her laptop and pointed straight to the social science section. “He’s only got two years here, and A-G needs three,” she said. “That summer CC course would fix this perfectly, but I see you looked at the general ed section of the community college website already. That world history course you marked? It’s not on the UC-approved A-G list. It won’t count.” I’d picked that one because it was $50 cheaper than the other option and fit my work schedule better, dropping him off after I dropped my younger kid at middle school. That was my second big mistake: assuming any college-level history course would automatically check the A-G box.
Over the course of that meeting, Ms. Lopez walked me through all the small, easy mistakes parents make all the time with A-G and CC courses, and I wrote them down in the notes app on my phone between work emails. The first is that you have to check the UC A-G course list on the UC Doorways website before you sign up and pay for any CC course. You can search by community college and subject, and it pulls up every course that’s approved for A-G credit. It takes two minutes, and I do it now before my son even talks to his counselor about a course. The second is that you need pre-approval from your high school counselor, even if the course is on the UC list. Some high schools have rules about how many CC credits you can count toward A-G, or won’t accept a course if you didn’t get approval before you took it. I just shoot a quick email: “Hi Ms. Lopez, can you confirm HIS 210 at Santa Monica CC counts for 10th grade social science A-G credit?” She gets back to me in 24 hours, no extra meetings needed.
Another mom I met at the school bake sale a month later told me her story to drive the point home. Her daughter was a straight-A student who loved science, so she skipped the visual and performing art requirement to take a third year of AP Biology. She didn’t realize she was missing the F credit for A-G until she started putting together her college list junior year. She ended up cramming a 6-week online CC art course the summer before senior year to fix the gap, and it worked, but it was a whole lot of extra stress that could have been avoided if she’d checked the requirements early. She also made the mistake of picking an out-of-state online CC course first, and learned that UC only accepts A-G credits from California community colleges or approved high school courses. That mistake cost her $200 and a month of time before she found the right course.
My son ended up taking the approved modern US history course that summer. He complained for the first week about the 8 a.m. start time, but ended up liking that the class was only 12 kids, way smaller than his 35-person high school history class. He got an A, and we checked off the last of his required A-G credits by the end of the summer before junior year.
We still have a whole year of application wrangling ahead of us, and I’m sure there will be new jargon and requirements to figure out. Last week, my son mentioned he wants to take a CC film course next semester to count for his G elective A-G credit, and the first thing I did was pull up the UC Doorways search tool to confirm it’s approved before I even told him he could sign up. I don’t stress about it anymore, not like I did that first day with the coffee-stained course sheet.
It’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the alphabet soup and unspoken rules of college admissions, but the whole process of using CC courses for A-G requirements boils down to three small steps that take 10 minutes total: check the approved list, get counselor pre-approval, then sign up. No fancy four-year plans or extra tutoring needed, just a little bit of double-checking before you spend any money or time. We’re still muddling through the college application process, but this part is sorted, and that’s enough for right now.
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