Know your transfer credits

If you’re considering going to college, it’s important to know what course credits transfer into the institution and what will transfer out. 

A credit is awarded for the successful completion of certain courses. The number of credits you have determines where you are on the path to a degree. 

The first thing that’s important to understand about credits that you may be bringing with you to college is that they should come from an accredited institution. Accreditation is the recognition from an accrediting agency that an institution maintains a certain level of educational standards. It’s important to differentiate here that there are both regionally- and nationally-accredited institutions, so an institution being accredited isn’t enough. Essentially, the accreditation statuses should “match” — regionally accredited institutions generally accept credit only from other regionally-accredited institutions. It’s also important to note that schools’ relative locations don’t determine regional accreditation status — regional accreditation has nothing to do with physical proximity.

At an institution such as Laramie County Community College, lower division, freshman and sophomore college-level courses completed with a grade of C or higher from regionally accredited institutions may be accepted in transfer. Upper division, junior, senior and graduate-level courses may be accepted in transfer to satisfy degree requirements with faculty approval. 

If you’re going to bring credit to a college from another accredited higher learning institution, it’s critical that you have an official transcript. Each institution has its own procedure for acquiring this official document, so you’ll need to contact that institution or institutions for more information. One important tip here is to keep your syllabi for any courses you take that you hope will count as college credit. That way the course can be accurately evaluated when processing your transfer. 

Typically, a person called a registrar evaluates transcripts for transfer. Each class is examined individually to determine if a credit is transferable. 

Some credits won’t transfer for the specific class you took, but you can still get credit toward a degree.  For example, if you took a class at another Wyoming community college that LCCC does not offer, such as a computer course, you would likely receive elective credit for that course at LCCC.

If you decide to take courses at LCCC, the good news is that those credits will generally be transferable to other regionally accredited institutions. The more general the course, the more likely it will be easy to transfer to another institution. For example, almost all accredited colleges in the country have an English composition course, so that’s easy to transfer. However, if you took a welding course at LCCC, you wouldn’t be able to transfer that as a welding credit at an institution that doesn’t have a welding program. 

LCCC has articulation agreements, which are formal arrangements between two or more colleges and universities to accept credits in transfer toward a specific academic program. But that doesn’t mean you can’t transfer your credits to another institution that LCCC doesn’t have an articulation agreement with. 

Another benefit of going to LCCC is that it is an Interstate Passport school. That means the block of lower-division general education courses transfer as a whole block to a list of other colleges that are part of the Interstate Passport. LCCC currently has 71 network institutions in 21 states. Learn more about the Interstate Passport program.

For more information about transfer credits, go to www.lccc.wy.edu. Once there, you can do things like make an appointment with a Success Coach, who is there to help guide you through the college admissions process.