Can you get an American undergraduate/bachelor degree with an European associate degree in 2 years?

18 comments

1. I don’t think having a degree makes a difference. To get a bachelor’s degree from an accredited US institution you’d need meet program’s requirement for credit-hours with the correct distribution across disciplines.

   It would come down to how many credit-hours your US school would be willing to “transfer” from your European degree program.

2. I think the courses you completed towards your degree would need to be evaluated to see what’s transferable and what equivalent courses are not required. It’s dependent on the schools, both European and American.

3. You would need to contact the Universities that you are interested in and speak with their admissions department to determine if your European classes are transferrable.

4. It would be up to the University to evaluate your credits for transferability.

   Realistically, you’d probably need to catch up on some general ed more so your major-specific courses.

5. It would depend on the courses you took and how many of them transferred over. It’s probably not impossible but our degrees work a bit differently.

   Our bachelor degrees are a bit broader than yours. You’ll need to take some combination of courses in math, science, history, humanities, art, etc. to earn a degree in computer science here.

6. Depends entirely on the two institutions issuing the degrees. You will need to speak to someone in the registrar at the US school to see how many credits they will accept.

7. I used to work in college admissions, helping Euro students get settled in particular.

   The associates degree in question will be evaluated on the individual level at each college/university.

8. Depends if the college or University accepts your course credits.

9. IME associate’s degrees in “cs” are more like glorified certificates in enterprise/web development rather than equivalent to the first two years of a cs bachelor’s.

10. Europe does associate degrees?

11. You don’t need an Associate’s degree to get a Bachelor’s degree. How much of the classes you took for your Associate’s degree count towards the Bachelor’s degrees will depend on the schools involved.

12. It would depend on how the credits transferred between the individual schools in question

13. US colleges typically require a lot of what we call humanities. These are courses outside of your major that you are required to take. From my understanding European colleges don’t have the same requirements. I think this would make getting a 4 year degree in 2 years hard as you might not have a lot of transfer credits.

14. Which country in Europe has associates degrees?

15. Impossible to answer without knowing the details of the Associates Degree.

    Plus, not only does every state have different requirements for transferring credits, but every school in a particular will often differ in their requirements.

16. No, they suffer from not being in America, and thus cannot be transferred.

17. Most colleges and universities require that you take at least 60 credits (usually 4 semesters) at the institution you’re graduating from. You would need a translated transcript to be sent to the college or university you want to transfer to so they can determine whether they’ll accept those credits. A translated syllabus could also help you in case they want to see the course content.

    Any admissions department would be happy to go over the requirements with you, though you might also need to talk to the advising department.

    Source: I work in admissions at a college.

18. I’m gonna say 3 years at least. Most of your courses won’t “transfer”. The university will give you a degree when you complete the degree requirements, the big ones are:

    1) Sufficient units (typically 128 for semester systems) (typical classes are 3 units per semester, with a lab-based classes being 4 or 5, typically. this is supposed to map to 3hr/week of class time).

    2) Sufficient coverage, per university (e.g. 6 units of English, 6 units of a foreign language, 6 units of “science”, 6 units of math, etc, etc). There is real trouble sometimes with diversity requirements – my university introduce an “ethnic studies” requirement shortly before I graduated, which required one of a limited list of classes that qualified as “ethnic”. If you’re fluent in something other than English, there might be some credit/credit equivilencies/requirement waivers you could get.

    3) Completing of a major field of study requirements (per department in the university, eg. computer science might require data structure, relational databases, systems, operating systems, etc, etc.) This is the area you might actually get some transfer traction.

    Inside the US, community colleges grant “associates degrees” and these are often laid out to match the first 2 years of the state’s colleges, ergo you can transfer in as a junior with the courses already pre-approved for transfer. Doesn’t work so well cross-states, and even less well internationally. 🙁