Hello, I really would appreciate your knowledge and advise. My daughter wants to be an Aerospace engineer. She is going to take her associates degree at our community college, and then the plan is to continue to Texas A&M or University of Texas Arlington for her majors. We have found all the prerequisite classes that she needs, except for the Aerospace introduction courses. UTA has some in their freshman Aerospace degree plan and A&M in their Sophomore year. Can she take these intro. courses during summer at the university while going to CC, or what other options does she have? Thank you for your time and help!
Most public schools will have articulation agreements with community colleges and will have a list of classes, by community college, that will fulfill requirements. I’d have your daughter call admissions at her destination schools for further clarification. They do this sort of thing day in and day out.
Your plan works for many people but it may require 3 years at the second school. Prerequisites and class sequencing would be the reason . Check out her specific class schedules for her entire time in college to see how it lays out. Be sure to factor in class availability which can be an issue at some schools.
If your plan is to save money, a 5 year plan might negate the savings at the CC.
In Ohio dual enrollment is free and so I have two kids that started their engineering college curriculum at our local community college (which has state regulated transfer agreements between state schools) and ended up in engineering programs at one of our state universities. Here are some of the challenges with doing that:
- The university gpa doesn't have the introductory classes/general education credits included. The university gpa is mostly going to reflect the upper level courses and those can be tough classes.
- No gen eds to balance course load Junior/Senior year. Upper level engineering courses have a lot of labs and it can be hard to schedule a full time credit load with out those intro. level/gen ed courses. Once kid 1 had to find a professor to create an independent study for credit just to be full time so scholarships could be used.
- Co-ops/Internships/Undergraduate Research are a really important part of engineering. These generally require professor recommendations, which are difficult to procure at a brand new school as a brand new student. And they are often applied for a semester or more in advance.
- Many engineering schools have group projects that result in tight study groups forming in freshman and sophomore year. It was difficult for Kid 1 to break into these groups. You are also expected to know processes that may be unique to the institution. The kinds of things they explain to Freshman, but figure are old hat to Juniors and Seniors and go unmentioned.
- Employers are only going to care about the BS in engineering. An associates isn't going to boost her starting pay as an engineer. Classes needed for an associates degree may or may not fulfill the general education requirements for the College of Engineering. At our state school the College of Arts and Sciences has different general education requirements than their College of Engineering. Make sure you are fulfilling courses that not only transfer in for credit, but also fulfill the specific requirements of the degree being pursued.
- Make sure the classes she takes are actually the pre-requisites she needs not just similarly named. Our community college offered Physics I & II, but since they were not calculus based they were not acceptable as pre-reqs for engineering classes. In other words, they were not the same Physics I & II that the engineering students at the university take. We knew those would need to be repeated. Some schools are very picky about what classes they will take to fulfill specific requirements although they are happy to award 'general credit'. So when the community college says the credits will all transfer, they very well may - but you need to understand the difference between general credit and meeting requirements to graduate at the target university.
- Others schools are more generous awarding credit as fulfilling the specific classes needed, but there can be some big gaps and the student is left to quickly self-teach some major concepts to catch up. Kid 1 spent a lot of time not just in professor office hours, but going back to hs teachers and other mentors to understand what was missing.
- When counting backward from the Senior engineering capstone class through the series of pre-reqs needed to get there it was 5 or 6 semesters beyond what the community college could offer. If you look at graduation rates for community college to university students it is often a 2 yr + 3 yr path in large part due to the way major classes build upon one another. Some schools only offer certain classes fall or spring semester. As the previous poster pointed out, if some one is going to end up paying for 3 years of university anyway they might as well begin that after one year of community college.
Getting into Texas A&M or University of Texas Arlington or another affordable engineering program as soon as possible is probably going to have many benefits. Engineering co-ops/internships pay well, but those opportunities are through the universities since the employers are usually looking for students enrolled in engineering programs pursuing a BS in engineering, not community colleges pursuing AA/AS. If money is tight, alternating co-ops can stretch out the time between tuition payments (basically cuts the year’s cost in half and tax credits go further) and puts the student in a position to help contribute, too.