BIG 3 (excelsior, tesc, cosc)

phaneuf1

Can anyone explain me the Big 3 concept?

I'm a bit confused... Everything you know would be helpful. I did a google seach but I didn't find much.

Legacy User

I have read many people refer to them as the big 3. i suppose its the main online schools that are competency based dont really know much about cosc. But what question are you really asking? What is confusing you?

Valsacar

The big 3 are Thomas Edison, Charter Oak State College, and Excelsior College. They are the three schools with the most liberal credit acceptance policies. Basically, they will take anything that is ACE approved for credit. They also have basically no residency requirements, IE you might have to take a capstone course with them, but could transfer in the rest of your degree. Before WGU they were basically the only way to REALLY accelerate a degree (by using CLEP/DANTES/ECE, ALEKS, StraigherLine, FIMA, etc courses). They are all non-profit schools and RA.

phaneuf1

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wgu vs big 3 for IT?

Valsacar

Depends on what you need, if you think you can do it all self study then go with WGU. If you want to be able to do some self-study and some regular classes then go with one of the big three (they all teach normal courses, of course).

spoonsslick

Thanks for the info. I'm going to give WGU a try and see how that goes for me.

erpadmin

Valsacar's expanation is quite on the money.

To add to that, and maybe even explain why WGU isn't quite the same as the "Big 3" is this:

With the Big 3: while you can CLEP, Straighterline, etc., etc, you also have the ability to take courses at other schools while under the Big 3 umbrella.

A colleague of mine actually is a Big 3 graduate (which helped me in decided whether I would follow that route or go WGU). The path he took to graduate from that Big 3 school took him years. He registered for courses at other universities and took very little CLEP exams. He went a marathon, and not a sprint.

I wasn't trying to sprint either, but what I liked about WGU was that I could go as fast as possible. With the Big 3, it's "technically" possible, but you still might have to utilize other colleges for coursework. Of course, keep in mind this was before Straighterline and ALEKS was made available...but the good thing about the Big 3 is that they are all public universities...(though "TESC* is probably the smallest in all of NJ...it's just a building in Trenton...I've seen it when I had business down there, but you're not exactly going to need classrooms when you're a correspondence school.)