Dear all, daughter is OOS and interested in Berkley CA, she will come in with many APs. I have looked at their website and tried to find out if she after her first year can take classes at our local community college during the summer to get ahead? Has anyone done that and know the answer? I thought that most state schools would allow that but CA might be different. Thanks
Local to you or local to UCB? Yes, she can take community college courses at a CC as long as they are UC transferable to UCB. If she plans to take CC courses in your home state, she needs to check with UCB which courses would be transferable. If she takes them at a CC in California, then assist.org can be used to determine transferability of classes.
Yes, it’s a fairly common thing to do during the summers. Berkeley won’t allow you to do it during the school year. You might say to yourself “well that’s obvious”, but nowadays there are tons of online classes that can be taken at a community college that would be tempting.
FWIW, my kid will have 44 semester units, all transferable to UC schools, from his community college and another 30-40 semester units from his AP classes going into Berkeley this fall, as a freshman. However, that doesn’t mean he’s going to graduate in 2 years (around 120 needed to graduate). All kinds of major requisites and pre-requisites, some college requisites, class availability, and the like probably will trip him up and extend things way out. Some of those CC or AP units possibly will be “wasted” as well, as there may be instances where it would do a student good to take the class at Berkeley again.
For California Schools refer to http://www.assist.org/web-assist/welcome.html
“ASSIST is an online student-transfer information system that shows how course credits earned at one public California college or university can be applied when transferred to another. ASSIST is the official repository of articulation for California’s public colleges and universities and provides the most accurate and up-to-date information about student transfer in California”
Yes, it would be a local community college on the east coast. I was actually thinking that she might take some classes during the summer after her first year at Berkley but also the summer after she graduates high school, before she has even started Berkley. Is that possible ? So ASSIST is for all California schools, not just Berkley?
Tuition at Berkeley will run you $65K per year.
As for summer classes, you MUST check with UCB before she signs up for anything.
She won’t be able to take many classes, to defray a lot of your costs, because the CC’s (in California) typically run for two summer sessions and courses generally are lengthy and usually run M-F. In other words, if she takes a bio class, for session one, it will probably run 4 hours. The lab will run another 3-4 hours. The speed of the courses will be a good primer for Berkeley’s courses.
Assist.org is for CA schools only and shows CA CC courses that articulate to the UC’s and Cal states.
Personally I would take CC classes only under these conditions 1) pre-requisite classes, background improvement (such as taking s programming language), breadth classes, some lower division equivalent classes, or classes that can be taught online 2) no lab classes 3) classes that the kid has little interest in. Even if all 3 conditions are met, often times the class should be taken at Berkeley for grade boosting purposes.