How do you transfer Everest college credits to a community college?

Answer 1

Transferring credits from one college to another is as simple, ideally, as applying to the new school, and then signing a permission for said new school to ask for a copy of your transcript from the old school. The new school will not take your word for it what credits you have. It must receive a copy of your transcript from your old school. Once the new school has said transcript, someone in the registrar's office at said new school will look at the transcript, and figure out what, if any of the courses on it, will transfer into the new school. If the registrar has any questions about any of the old school's courses, then s/he will contact the old school and ask for a course syllabus for each one. From that, s/he can tell whether the course is truly equivalent to any of the new school's courses.

Of course, none of that works unless both schools -- the old one, and the new one -- are accredited by an agency approved by the US Department of Education (USDE), and/or the USDE-sanctioned Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA). More than that, the old school must be accredited by a USDE- and/or CHEA-approved agency that's acceptable to the new school.

And that's where you may have a problem, and here's why: Everest is, indeed, accredited by a USDE- and CHEA-approved accreditor. So, then, so far, so good. However, Everest's accreditor is what's called a "national" accreditor that's USDE- and CHEA-approved; and on the scale of such national accreditors, Everest's isn't one of the better ones. It's not a bad one, mind you, but it could be better...

...at least in the mind of the community college registrar. Don't get me wrong, I, personally, like Everest's accreditor. But the kind of accreditor that accredits community colleges -- one of the US's six big "regional" accreditors -- is generally considered to be a higher-quality of academic accreditor than is the more career-college-type accreditor that accredits Everest.

Consequently, the community college registrar may be unwilling to accept as many of Everest's credits as you'd probably like. It's even possible that the community college won't accept any of them. It should, mind you, but it might not.

The six big "regional" accreditors -- sometimes referred to as the "gold standard" of USDE- and CHEA-approved accreditors -- have done a pretty good job of convincing their accredited schools to kinda' turn-up their noses at courses from nationally accredited schools like Everest. CHEA is trying to disabuse its approved regional accreditors of such foolishness; and so it launched what's called the "CHEA Higher Education Transfer Alliance" (HETA) to try to get all USDE- and CHEA-approved accreditors, and their schools, to play nice. But not all regionally-accredited schools, like the typical community college, are on-board yet. And so some of them are happy to accept course credits in transfer from such as Everest, and some aren't. There's no way to predict.

Ideally, though, it should be as simple as applying to the comunity college, and then telling it whose course credits you want to transfer, then signing the permission for the community college to send for your Everest transcript; and then, from there, it's up to the community college's registrar. If you're lucky, most -- maybe even all -- of your Everest credits will transfer...

...but don't count on it. Keep your mind open, and be prepared for anywhere from sorta' okay news, to downright bad news. I don't know any other way to put it. It can be heartbreaking when a regionally-accredited school, like a comunity or state college turns-up its nose at nationally-accredited transfer credits. More regionally-accredited schools should be HETA members; and should be more liberal in their assessments of nationally-accredited transfer credits. But many of them aren't; and unless you know how to challenge their assessments of the transfer credits, and show them that they're not being reasonable in an academically-defensible manner, then you'll just be out of luck.