Can You Use ASU Universal Learners Credits for a Community College Associate Degree to Transfer?
The grease from Javi’s pepperoni slice was seeping through the cardboard box onto my scuffed kitchen table when he turned his beat-up laptop toward me, the ASU Universal Learners homepage glowing blue against the dark dining room walls. A muted baseball game played on the TV behind him, and he kept glancing at his phone to see if his boss at the local coffee shop had texted back about a shift swap. “I can take a class for $25 just to see if I like it,” he said, tapping the screen with a calloused finger. “But what if I do like it? Can I use these credits at my community college to get my associate, then transfer to ASU for a bachelor’s?” As a part-time community college academic advisor who’s fielded this exact question twice a week this semester, I leaned back in my chair. It’s not a yes or no answer, but it’s not as complicated as most education websites make it sound.
Javi is my 19-year-old nephew, who got his GED last year after struggling with chronic anxiety his junior and senior year of high school. He graduated with a 2.2 GPA, couldn’t qualify for the in-state bachelor’s program he wanted, and couldn’t afford to pay full tuition for full-time classes anyway. He works 30 hours a week to help his mom pay rent, so he’s been taking one or two classes at a time at our local community college, slowly working toward his associate degree. He saw ASU Universal Learners on TikTok a few weeks prior, and the low cost immediately caught his eye. For anyone who hasn’t heard of it, the program lets you take any of ASU’s online general education classes for $25 upfront. You only pay the full course fee (around $400, last I checked) if you pass the class and want to claim the official credit. It’s designed for students who want to test out classes or knock out requirements cheaply, but no one seems to spell out clearly if those credits can transfer to a community college for an associate degree.
A few months before Javi asked me this question, I worked with a 20-year-old student named Mia who had already signed up for three ASU Universal Learners classes without checking anything first. She passed all three, paid the fees, ordered her transcripts, and found out only one would count toward her associate. The community college didn’t accept her out-of-state online composition class because of their placement policy for students who didn’t graduate from traditional high school, and her math class didn’t match their required course outline. She didn’t lose a ton of money, but she lost three months of study time that she could have put toward classes that would have counted. That’s the biggest mistake I see people make: jumping in because the cost is low, without doing 30 minutes of prep work first.
The first thing I tell anyone asking this question is to get your transfer credit pre-approved before you enroll in any ASU class. Almost every community college has a free online transfer credit evaluation form you can fill out before you sign up for anything. You just plug in the ASU course number, course name, and paste a link to the public syllabus ASU posts on its website, and the registrar’s office will tell you within a week if it will count toward your degree. That 30 minutes of work avoids 90% of the problems people run into. Second, stick to 100 and 200-level courses. ASU Universal Learners has some upper-division 300 and 400-level classes too, but those won’t count toward the general education requirements for a 60-credit associate degree, so you can just filter those out right away when you’re browsing. Third, check your community college’s residency requirement. Most require you to take 15 to 25 credits directly through their school to award you an associate degree, so you can’t do all 60 credits through ASU Universal Learners. But you can do 35 to 45 credits, which for most students cuts their total community college tuition by thousands. For Javi, that’s $5,000 in savings he can put toward his bachelor’s degree later.
What about after you get your associate? If your credits are approved and added to your community college transcript, your associate degree is exactly the same as any other associate degree from that school. Most four-year universities have articulation agreements with in-state community colleges that guarantee the full associate degree will transfer as junior standing, regardless of where the transferred credits came from, as long as they’re on your community college transcript. If you’re planning to transfer to ASU specifically, that works too: ASU has its own transfer agreements with community colleges across the country, and your associate degree from an accredited community college will be treated the same as any other. One small tip I always add: save a copy of every syllabus to your Google Drive, even after you get approval. Sometimes the person doing the evaluation needs to see it again when the transcript comes in, and digging it up a year later is a huge hassle.
Javi took my advice a week after we talked at my kitchen table, and submitted pre-evaluations for the four classes he wanted to take: intro to environmental science, college algebra, intro to sociology, and English 101. Three got approved within five days. English 101 didn’t, because our community college still requires GED students to take their in-house introductory English course before they can enroll in college composition, no exceptions. That was disappointing for Javi, but it’s better he found out before he spent the time and $25 to take the class. Right now, he’s enrolled in the in-house English at community college this semester, and signed up for the three approved ASU Universal Learners classes to start next month, when his work schedule slows down for the winter. He’s still on track to finish his associate degree in two and a half years, instead of the four he was looking at before, and he’s saved enough on tuition to keep making his car payment while he studies.
It’s not a magical shortcut, and there are no guarantees every credit will work out the way you want. But for students who are willing to do a little prep work up front, it’s a solid option that makes college more affordable for people who can’t afford to pay full price for every class right now. We’ll see how the first semester goes, but so far, it feels like a good fit.
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