A-G and CC Courses: What Every California High School Parent Needs to Know
The crumpled course selection sheet was spread across our kitchen table last week, half covered by my sophomore Javi’s cherry soda stain, when he pointed at the side-by-side columns labeled A-G Approved and CC Elective and said, “My counselor talked through it, but I still don’t get what any of this means. Can you just figure it out for me?”
I nodded, but my stomach dropped a little. My oldest went to a small private high school that mapped A-G requirements onto every student’s schedule automatically; you just checked the box next to the classes they suggested and called it done. Javi’s at our local public high school, and this year he’s old enough to pick most of his own electives—so suddenly all the fine print about requirements is on us to sort through.
I texted a friend from the neighborhood whose oldest just finished his first year at UC Santa Barbara, and we met for coffee the next morning. She pulled out her phone and pulled up a three year old note she’d written after messing up her first son’s schedule. “I thought CC meant ‘college credit, so obviously it counts for A-G,’” she said, stirring her latte. “My son signed up for a personal training class at the community college to knock out his PE A-G requirement sophomore year. Turned out that course wasn’t on the approved A-G list. We had to cram a four week summer PE class between driver’s ed and his part time job junior year, and it was a mess.”
That’s the thing no one tells you when your kid hits high school: A-G and CC aren’t two separate competing options, they’re overlapping systems that you have to cross reference if you don’t want to end up short on requirements senior year, when it’s too late to fix it easily.
For any other parents still googling at 9pm like I was, A-G is just the set of course requirements the University of California and California State University systems require you complete in high school just to be eligible to apply. Each letter corresponds to a subject area—A is history/social science, B is English, C is math, and so on—you need a certain number of years of each, and every class you count toward that requirement has to be pre-approved by the UC system. CC courses here are concurrent enrollment classes: classes your high school student can take at the local community college, for free or next to nothing, that count for both high school graduation and college credit.
The confusion comes when people assume all CC courses automatically count toward A-G requirements. That’s the first big mistake most parents make. The second is assuming if your kid is planning to go straight to community college after graduation, they don’t need to bother with A-G at all. I heard that from three different parents last month, and it’s not true. If your kid starts at community college with the plan to transfer to a four-year UC or CSU later, you still need those A-G credits to be eligible to transfer. It’s way easier to knock them out in high school than it is to take extra classes after you graduate just to qualify.
After my coffee with Lisa, I sat down that night with Javi’s course sheet and pulled up the free public UC A-G course search website. I typed in our local community college’s name, and pulled up the full list of every CC class they offer that’s approved for A-G credit. It took 15 minutes to cross check what Javi wanted to take against what he still needed.
Turns out, Javi wanted to take two electives this year: auto shop, which he’s been bugging us about since he fixed my broken bike last summer, and graphic design. Auto shop doesn’t count for any A-G requirement, and the high school’s graphic design class isn’t approved either. If he took both, he’d end up one visual and performing arts credit short of the A-G requirement by graduation.
Instead of making him skip auto shop—he wants to study mechanical engineering, so it’s actually great experience for him—we looked through the approved CC course list and found an online art history class that starts after school one day a week. It counts for the A-G F requirement, and it’ll count toward his general education requirement no matter where he goes to college after high school. It cost $15 for enrollment fees, which is way cheaper than the $100+ AP exam fee for an AP art class he didn’t even want to take. I also learned that approved CC courses get the same extra grade point bump in UC GPA calculations that AP classes get, which is another little detail I had no idea about before this whole process.
The small concrete things that have made this easier for me, after sorting through all the confusion: every year when course selection comes around, I spend 10 minutes marking how many A-G credits Javi has in each category, and cross check any CC courses he wants to take against the UC’s approved list. I email his counselor once a year to ask them to double check my math, because I’m not a professional and it’s easy to miss something. If he wants to take a fun class that isn’t A-G approved, we don’t say no—we just work one small approved CC class into his schedule over the year or summer, instead of cramming it all in senior year.
Javi still hasn’t decided if he wants to go straight to a four-year university after graduation or start at the local CC and transfer later. This plan lets him keep both options open, without making him give up the classes he actually cares about. We might still mess up a requirement somewhere, I’m sure. I still get emails from other parents in the PTA asking what A-G and CC even mean, so I send them the link to the UC course search and tell them what I learned from my friend’s mistake. It’s not rocket science, but it’s definitely one of those things that no one walks you through step by step until you’re stuck at the kitchen table with a soda-stained course sheet, wondering what all the acronyms actually mean.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » A-G and CC Courses: What Every California High School Parent Needs to Know