Can I Use ASU Universal Learners Credit for a Community College Associate Degree Before Transferring?
The crumb of pepperoni pizza stuck to the corner of my 19-year-old Jax’s laptop screen as he turned it toward me Tuesday night. He’d bailed on an overpriced private college after one semester, was working 25 hours a week at the local Starbucks, and had just stumbled on ASU’s Universal Learners program on TikTok. “It’s $25 a class if I pass,” he said, pointing at the screen. “Can I knock out all my gen ed here, transfer the credits to the community college, get an associate degree, then transfer to the state university? That would cut my gen ed cost from $3,000 to $300.” As someone who helps neighborhood kids sort out college planning after high school, I’d gotten this question three times in the last month. But I’d never walked through the whole process step by step, so we dug in together.
The first thing we checked was accreditation. ASU Universal Learners classes are actual ASU classes, taught by ASU faculty, and Arizona State is regionally accredited by the Higher Learning Commission, the same as our local community college and most public colleges in the U.S. That’s the baseline requirement for credit transfer, so that checked out. But I knew right away that accreditation doesn’t automatically mean a community college will accept the credit. Every school sets its own rules.
We pulled up our community college’s public transfer equivalency tool first, which I’ve told dozens of parents to bookmark. It lets you search any accredited college and see how their classes line up with the community college’s requirements. We typed in Arizona State, then searched for the first two classes Jax wanted to take: Introduction to Communication and College Algebra. Both popped up as exact equivalents for the community college’s general education requirements, which count toward the 60 credits needed for an associate of arts degree. When we checked Intro to Creative Writing, though, we hit a snag: ASU’s version was 1 credit, and the community college requires 3 credits for its core writing requirement, so that one wouldn’t count. That’s the first big thing I didn’t fully appreciate until we did this: every single class has to match on credit count and content, or it won’t transfer.
The next day, Jax called the community college’s transfer advisor on his lunch break, sitting in his car in the Starbucks parking lot eating a granola bar. She confirmed what we’d found, and added two key details no one talks about online. First, the community college caps transfer credits at 30 out of the 60 needed for an associate degree. No matter how many ASU classes Jax takes and passes, he can only use 30 of those credits toward his degree. He’ll still need to take 30 credits at the community college to graduate with an associate. Second, the public equivalency tool is just a guide. If you email the advisor a full list of the classes you want to take, they’ll do a free preliminary evaluation before you enroll. That’s a concrete step most people skip, because they assume the online tool is 100% accurate.
We sent over Jax’s list of eight planned gen ed classes that week, and got a response back three days later: seven of the eight would transfer, the one that wouldn’t was that 1-credit creative writing class we’d already flagged. That saved us from wasting time on a class that wouldn’t count toward the degree. She also reminded us that you only pay ASU’s $25 fee after you pass the class, so even if you sign up and realize it’s not a good fit before you finish, you don’t owe anything. That’s a nice safety net we hadn’t considered.
Next, we checked with the admissions office at the state university Jax wants to attend after he gets his associate. Our state has a guaranteed transfer program: any associate degree from an in-state community college with a 2.5 GPA transfers fully to any public four-year bachelor’s program. We asked if the ASU credits that were accepted by the community college would cause any issues when we transferred the whole associate degree. The transfer advisor told us that as long as the credits are part of the completed, accredited associate degree, the university doesn’t re-evaluate individual credits from the original school. She did add a caveat: for competitive programs like nursing or engineering, you might need to have core math and science classes re-evaluated even if they’re on the community college transcript, so it’s always worth checking with the four-year program’s advisor early.
So far, what we’ve learned is that this path works, but it’s not the “get a degree for $100” hack TikTok makes it out to be. You can’t do the entire associate degree through ASU Universal Learners, because of the transfer credit cap at most community colleges. You have to do the legwork of checking every class with advisors before you enroll, which takes a couple hours of work, but it’s worth it. For Jax, who’s still working full time and figuring out his major while saving money, this is perfect. He’s starting two classes this semester, paying only if he passes, and he doesn’t have to take on extra debt to get started.
Right now, we don’t know how it will all turn out. He hasn’t finished the first two classes, hasn’t sent his official transcript to the community college, hasn’t started his full-time associate coursework. The advisor told us about one student who took six ASU classes without checking first, and only one transferred, so we’ve been careful not to skip that step. For students who want to work while going to school and cut down on student debt, it’s a solid option that’s worth the extra few hours of upfront work. We’ll update the neighborhood parents in a year when Jax transfers, but so far, it’s looking like it will work exactly how he hoped.
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