California Coast University Credit Transfer

Is anyone familiar with Califofnia Coast University? Does anyone know if their general education courses transfer to colleges similar to the University of Texas in Arlington?

 

You'd need to ask the colleges similar to the University of Texas at Arlington to be sure. My guess is that no, they don't.

 

One thing to do is never assume that a regionally accredited institution won't accept credits from a nationally accredited institution. Each institution has its own policies on this, and while there are RA schools that won't accept NA credits, plenty RA schools do.

I checked three programs at UTA and the good news is that their admission requirements list nationally accredited transcripts as an accepted instrument for the Nursing program and the Public Health program, but I didn't see it for the Teaching program, so the best thing to do is contact the school (they have a chat system on their site) and ask about your specific program. If they tell you they don't accept nationally accredited credits (because sometimes people just say no right off due to popular assumptions and biases), tell the person about the two programs I mentioned and they may look deeper and find that the program you want to go into does accept them.

Let us know how it turns out.

 

I'm guessing the odds of getting an accurate answer to that question are better if you ask them than if you post your question here....by a magnitude of, oh, I don't know, infinity.

 

I second that emotion. Your negotiating skills could be more valuable than a clear read of the school's transfer credit policy.

 

Thanks for the guidance guys. I will try to knock that out and let you all know.

 

I know I'm being redundant here, as I’ve said this countless times over some 30 years, but here goes . . .

If you didn’t choose a mickey-mouse school like California Coast over an RA program in the first place, you would not have to ask about transferability today. Yes. I know that since I said that years ago, Cal Coast has gone on to achieve DEAC accreditation, but I have also consistently said that DEAC is mickey mouse as well.

Am I a snob? Damn right I am, but I never had to ask whether my degrees would be accepted or my courses could transfer elsewhere.

And that is why, as always, I laugh at you. Thank you. Thank you very much.

 

There will always be a % of people who will enroll in DEAC accredited schools for different reasons and some without an understanding of NA vs RA accreditation.
While it's easier today to do research on accreditation yet for some people the fact that a school needs to be properly accredited is still unknown.

There are success stories of people with DEAC accredited degrees as well. I don't think they are Mickey -mouse schools. In some instances its small business vs big business.
While Steve had no issues with his RA accredited degrees I know people who had issues with transferring their RA credits. But its usually significantly more hits than misses.

In a competitive world like today with all the DL On-Line programs, one will as always benefit from earning a degree from a university that has good name recognition and best accreditation.
A friend from a well-known top corporation used to see over the many years in the company interns from state universities or similar level schools, but today these candidates rarely get the internships, he is saying
its almost always going to Stanford, Cal Tech, Cornel, Berkeley, Harvard, Columbia etc, candidates.
I also saw this with my son's friends who went to top schools vs these who went to local community colleges and state universities. With some exceptions as some of his friends are so bright that
they would achieve their goals with whatever education they have.

 

It appears most of the masters programs at UTA only accept RA bachelors, but the education programs seem ambiguous (purposely?). It's too bad California Coast did not get their courses reviewed by ACE (American Council on Education) since that might have given you some more punch to your persuasive argument. Regardless, I fully agree with LearningAddict that due to the circumstances, your best approach is to point out their own requirements of two programs listed. Also, I am very interested in how this plays out since both my offspring are UT grads.

 

The view of "proper" is relative to the position one takes on the matter. By all legal and official standards, any accreditor okayed by the U.S. Department of Education is proper. Most people are only concerned with the school being accredited or not which is the first level standard. At the second level of investigation, most will seek a regionally accredited school, but many never question what that means, nor do they understand it, and are only following popular opinions and perceptions. Unlike other parts of the world where institutions are judged individually, we tend to make pre-judgments about school quality based solely on its accreditation, location, tax status or delivery method. The same thing happens with the whole for-profit vs. non-profit situation, or private vs. public to a smaller degree, online vs. ground-based, east coast vs. other areas, and so on. That's not to say those pre-judgments are always wrong, or even always right, it may be somewhere in the middle. Thing is, nobody really knows for sure one way or the other. What we do know (or at least anyone who has been here or on boards like it for any length of time) is that no matter where you go someone will have a negative view of that school or a negative view of the types of people that go there (e.g., people who go to X ivy league school are snobs, people who go to X for-profit school are bad students).

Lastly, the trap many people find themselves in (often without even realizing it) is going to a well-known and more expensive school and spending a fortune because they're concerned with opinions they read, only to wind up in the same place they would have been had they gone to another lesser known school and possibly paid less. This can especially sting when one looks at the rest of the field and reads the colleges those people attended, many of which are barely known if at all on a national level. Generally, once you're outside the Ivy League, and outside the just-as-prestigious level schools like Stanford, then outside the schools with a big-time football or basketball team, you're unlikely to impress anyone with where you got your degree.

 

I believe I only checked the bachelors programs because he mentioned wanting to transfer "general education" courses which are usually undergrad concerns.

 

This post is a fair summary of a large number of discussions held on this board over the past 3-5 years. Another topic that touches on many of those listed by LA is the topic of utility. My first introduction to this general idea - the utility of the degree - came from Dr. Bear and we see examples of this routinely on the board . . . here is an Orthodox Church/Seminary offering a credential without accreditation. This place breaks some of the rules about what is acceptable and yet it has excellent utility for the people who earn the credential. Who knows why someone would go to UPhoenix, that dastardly evil for-profit? Well I might do it if my employer was paying the way. And . . . it seems to have good utility in the marketplace and so I might sniff at their recruiting practices and their degree completion rates, it's true that many non-profits are doing much the same (ASU and USNH come to mind). The degrees have utility even if it's just some sort of "check the box" utility. And that's at least a portion of what we're all doing.

 

That's harsh, as usual, Steve.

I guess you'll say my Ashworth College bachelor's degree is a mickey mouse degree. When I started at Ashworth in 2011, I knew nothing about the difference between NA and RA. I also didn't know of degreeinfo, I only joined in 2014. All I knew was that it was accredited by an agency recognized by the U.S. DoED.

I applied to St. John's University in NY as a transfer student after completing my associate degree and had 51 of my credits accepted and offered $15, 000 per year in transfer scholarship (the maximum amount for transfer students). I didn't take the offer but continued at Ashworth.

My education since then has been at non-profit, private, or state universities with regional or regional equivalent accreditation.

 

Absolutely nothing wrong with an NA degree. I am currently working on one now. USDoE and CHEA recognized. If I were to not think for myself and listen to the likes of some of the posters on this forum, I wouldn't have gotten as far as I have now in the real world. What is that quote by Eleanor Roosevelt?-- "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent". And the great Mark Twain: "Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great".

 

I've found that people who are sometimes unhappy with themselves, try to make others feel that way about themselves. No, Steve, I am not referring to you. I am speaking in general terms. In life, you have to just do-watchya-like!

 

Your statement is vague. There are plenty of things wrong with degrees from schools accredited by national agencies instead of regional associations. They enjoy a lower level of acceptability in the workplace as well as a lower utility when credits and degrees are being transferred to, or used for admission to, regionally accredited schools.

This may or may not apply to any one person's situation, but the overall truth is undeniable.

This proves nothing. We already know that there are non-RA agencies recognized by USDoE and CHEA. It doesn't negate the facts, however. And your pursuit of such a degree is your issue; your circumstances might not apply to the next person.

As a rule, if you want the greatest amount of flexibility and utility for the future, get a degree from a regionally accredited school. Again, YMMV.

That doesn't make any sense. Are you saying that you could NOT pursue a degree at a regionally accredited school, and that you're glad you weren't dissuaded from pursuing the degree you chose? I have yet to hear the argument for pursuing a degree at a nationally accredited school, with some very narrow exceptions. But as a rule? No.

You sound like a victim. Or, more accurately, someone who wants to act as one, since no one here has actually victimized you.

 

Um, "YMMV?"

 

Your Mileage May Vary!

 

The nuance fairy is here to spread magical caveats...

To be honest, I'm ready for the whole "RA vs NA" argument to die. The main reason is that the accreditation landscape isn't really as simple as "RA vs NA."

The whole argument is built on this premise that there are only two classes of accreditor. Legally, that might be true. In practice, however, we have seen that it simply isn't the case.

The NAs of the country include the smaller, vocationally focused accreditors who don't even accredit degrees or don't accredit above the associates level.

The faith based accreditors mileage varies for reasons well beyond what we often discuss here. This also gets muddled by the number of faith based schools holding multiple accreditations. It's impossible for us to make a sweeping statement about how a degree from an ABHE accredited school will doom you to a life of mediocrity because you can't use it to get into an RA grad program because there are a number of ABHE/RA schools with grad programs where this won't present a barrier.

And before we go down the "Well, limiting yourself to RA/ABHE schools is a big limitation!" road, let's consider that the sort of person going to an ABHE accredited school for their undergrad education is likely to be the person to continue with a religious school into graduate studies. As a matter of fact, Clarks Summit University (formerly Baptist Bible College) is so proudly ABHE that they extend a graduate tuition discount to any student coming in with an ABHE undergrad degree.

We say that ATS is the gold standard for theological education. Yet, we have never discussed what limitations to utility might exist for someone with a degree from a school that is accredited by ATS only (yes, they exist, typically smaller schools).

We have, on numerous occasions, acted as if a non-ABA law school with RA is actually more utilitarian than a non-ABA law school accredited by the DEAC even though every job posting I can find requiring or preferring a JD specifies that it be from an ABA accredited school, granting no consolation points for RA in lieu.

The New York Board of Regents is yet another exception to our self-created rule, one that gets written off frequently because they only accredit a few schools. Yet, the fact that they accredit three doctoral programs all in the hard sciences, kind of makes them an exception worth noting especially since their scientists can be found at respected research universities around the world.

THEN there is the fact that we have no idea how programmatic accreditation for NA degrees is going to transform the landscape in the long term. At the time when our esteemed Dr.(2) Douglas conducted his research into acceptability, the thought of a DEAC accredited school also obtaining programmatic accreditation would have been a fantasy, let alone the solid programmatic accreditations we are seeing take hold. Engineering (technology) and nursing programmatic accreditation is a massive game changer for those industries.

For nursing, programmatic accreditation can mean the difference between your nursing degree is only valid for licensing in its home state versus you enjoy the nationwide freedom to get licensed wherever you like.

These things matter.

At a certain point, I think it's important to realize just how many of our assumptions are based on conditions that no longer apply from a world that has changed drastically from the point those assumptions were first made, no matter how informed they were at the time.

In another thread some months ago after a few seasoned board members proclaimed unaccredited education "dead" in the sense that there were no legitimate unaccredited schools left out there anymore, the conversation simply died off after I pointed out that New York has two unaccredited mortuary schools awarding state registered (approved, but not regents accredited) associates degrees which are licensure qualifying.

Times they are a 'changin. And nothing in the accreditation landscape of the US is black and white. I'm not sure why this is such a controversial statement to make on these boards but I'm going to keep saying it.

 

I would only want to point out that there are other fields where programmatic accreditation is essential.

• Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET)
• Accrediting Bureau of Health Education Schools (ABHES)
• American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (AAMFT)
• American Association of Community Colleges (AACC)
• American Association of Family and Consumer Sciences (AAFCS)
• American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU)
• American Council for Construction Education (ACCE)
• American Council on Education (ACE)
• American Culinary Federation (ACF)
• American Library Association (ALA)
• American Psychological Association (APA)
• Association for Clinical Pastoral Education (ACPE)
• Association of Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB)
• Association of American Universities (AAU)
• Association of Collegiate Business Schools and Programs (ACBSP)
• Association of Schools of Journalism and Mass Communication (ACEJMC)
• Aviation Accreditation Board International (AABI)
• Commission of English Language Program Accreditation (CEA)

• Computer Science Accreditation Commission (CSAC)
• Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs
• Council for Interior Design Accreditation (CIDA)
• Council on Education for Public Health (CEPH)
• Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools (MSA)
• Council on Social Work Education (CSWE)
• National Association of Schools of Public Affairs & Administration (NASPAA)
• National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB)
• National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU)
• National Association of Industrial Technology (NAIT)
• National Association of Schools of Public Affairs & Administration (NASPAA)
• National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE)
• National Recreation & Park Association (NRPA)
• New York State Board of Regents and the Commissioner of Education
• Planning Accreditation Board (PAB)
• Society of American Foresters (SAF)
• Teacher Education Accreditation Council (TEAC)