AF Commission with TESU Degree

[dfrecore]

Hello, this thread is just what I've been searching for! I would be so grateful if anyone could throw in their two cents on my situation. Trying to navigate this myself has been tough. Here's the quick rundown: I will be 27 in a few weeks. I am interested in joining AFROTC at an out-of-state university and pursuing one of the "highly desired" language majors for scholarship. I currently have, to my knowledge, ZERO college credits. I am aware of the requirement to be 31 or under upon commissioning to receive scholarship. Basically, I'm thinking my best option is to test out of freshman year in six months or less, if possible. I am more than determined enough to do this, I just need a good gameplan. What would be the CLEP tests I would want to take to fully test out of my first year? Currently, I am studying for the College Composition test with Modern States and should be ready to schedule my exam in less than a week.

So, you need to figure out what school you want to go to, and then it's a 2-part thing: 1) get accepted to your school of choice, and 2) get an AFROTC scholarship.  At that point, you would want to see what the alternative credit policy is at that school.

My son is in HS and wants to go to college on a NROTC scholarship.  It's a pretty complicated process.  First, I made a list (copied from the website) of every school that has NROTC available.  Then, we crossed off anywhere that he didn't want to go (that was mostly region-based).  Then, we crossed off any school that didn't offer his major. Then, I looked up pertinent info for about 10 schools that interested him for various reasons: size of school, cost of room & board (it's not free through NROTC, but some schools have great deals or scholarships), size of NROTC program, etc.  Then, I looked up the CLEP/DSST/ACE policies at each of those schools - some are fantastic and will take ACE, most don't, and many will take CLEP.  We've also planned out his AP courses to see what would be most beneficial for him at a majority of the schools.

As you can see, it's not easy to figure out - but you need to do your research and see what the AFROTC gives you, choose a few schools, apply to all of them, apply for the AFROTC scholarship, and then see where that lands you.  It's made easier by the fact that you know what kind of degree you want, so that will narrow down your list of schools.  But you at least need to narrow it down to a manageable number of schools, and figure out the alternative credit policies at those schools.

BTW - AFROTC pays for your schooling, so I'm not entirely sure why you'd need to take a bunch of CLEP exams to transfer in - I'm not sure they'd let you do only 3 years anyway, so you'd still need to be a full-time student for all 4 of those years.  So there may not be a huge benefit to you to do this at all.  The reason we are looking at it for my son is because he's looking at engineering, and many schools require more than the standard 120cr to get the degree - if we are able to do a lot of the GE and some early sciences courses through AP/CLEP, then it makes it more realistic for him to graduate in 4 years, and even to possibly take a lighter load than he might be required to take (like 14-15cr instead of 17-18cr per semester).