CUNY - Online Degree Completion ($4,575! Transfer up to 105 credits out of 120!)

[Merlin]

One thing many of you don't know about CUNY is that you're going to have to take a number of upper level courses which are going to have prerequisites. It is not nearly as easy or as cheap as it sounds. I know because I have experience with CUNY and SUNY. I have 2 degrees from SUNY schools and looked at moving onto CUNY. I was all set until the transfer credit evaluation was done. It was EXTREMELY disappointing. Just because you take a course from a RA does not mean they are going to accept it. They are not uber generous with credit.

Yeah, I've tried to indicate as much in my posts above.

The 15 residency credits being at least partially (if not wholly) upper-level courses in the degree is a given I'd think. To issue a degree they are going to require some of the most critical courses in the degree program to be earned with them to prove competency.

Transferability between colleges has been a problem forever. Some people assume that just because you have earned credit somewhere that it will be usable universally at any other college, and that is rarely the case. Incoming transfer courses must be evaluated at the syllabus-level and will need to be a 1:1 replacement of the same course at the destination college in order to fulfill the course requirements. So even if a course has the same name, that doesn't mean it will meet the requirements at the destination school if their syllabi include different content. Not understanding this makes people lose their minds over transfer credits and is probably the #1 reason people rant about colleges on academic forums.

One of the big advantages of the Big 3 and WGU is that people on this forum have years of experience working with their evaluators so we can be fairly confident in how transfer courses (at least alt. credits) will evaluate at those schools. We don't have similar knowledge at CUNY.

Based on your experience, it sounds like they may be very picky about what courses they accept to meet degree requirements. WGU is similar... transfer problems are one of the biggest negatives against them and the #1 catalyst for rant threads about them on this forum. The Big 3 are much more generous in how they evaluate and apply transfer credits.

As long as people keep this in mind when considering CUNY, it could still be a good (and relatively inexpensive) option for people looking to complete a partially finished degree.