Big 3 to Lawyer/Law School in CA - Feedback Requested

[Merlin]

If your goal is to enter law school you should probably figure out which law school you want to attend and understand the admission requirements before you start your degree plan, so you can be sure to incorporate those requirements into the plan.

For example, if your chosen school requires 60 graded credits, you should probably determine which graded credits those are and also plan where to take them. Some schools may insist on those credits coming from a 4-year school, but if not, you can take them at a community college for much cheaper.

For some schools, they are looking for a minimum GPA, but in many cases, a lack of a GPA (or less than 60 graded credits) can be worked around by coming in with a combination of other factors, like a higher LSAT score, excellent references, amazing application essay, an impressive career history, or even having the right connections. That said, the graded credits and GPA is easier to manage than some of the other things if you plan ahead accordingly.

As for paying for alternate credits, if you end up taking courses at a CC you can get a Pell grant or other financial aid to pay for your courses and books, and anything you have left over can be used to pay for alt. education courses via Study.com, Straighterline, or CLEP. Whatever you do, if you end up planning your final degree from TESU, don't take any extra courses from there that are not required; the per-credit costs at TESU (even with Study.com discount) are too high. Look for CC or other online options.

One caveat with the above, regardless of the course number/level, TESU considers all coursework from community colleges (even 300+ level) to be lower-level. So depending on the degree plan, you may need to aim for the majority of your GenEd courses to come from the CC. The law school will probably evaluate the courses themselves and may consider them upper-level if they are 300+ level courses, but TESU won't. So if there are upper-level courses that you need for the TESU degree, you should look at Study.com options for those, unless they are required for the law school as well, in which case you might need to look at taking a few courses from other online 4-year schools, like CSU Global, etc.

FYI, you can probably ignore at least 80% of what you read on BAin4Weeks. That is an OLD site and last I saw, it was woefully out of date. Online education changes quickly, particularly at TESU. The best bet is to look at the degree forum wiki and just read the forum posts (current and older) here for a few weeks to get up to speed.

We were all new once, so you're probably making it all seem harder than it should be. Take it slow and you'll get there.