Have you ever wondered if you can get a college to accept credit they say they won’t take? Of course you have! HS4CC parents are smart, and it doesn’t take long before you start thinking about workarounds and loopholes. Let’s talk about the right way – and the wrong way- to push your teen’s credit forward.
💭 “My college doesn’t accept CLEP, but XYZ University does. Can I record my CLEP credit with XYZ University before sending it to my college?”
💭 “My college doesn’t accept Sophia credit. but if I put it on a partner college’s transcript first, can I send it to my college that way?”
💭 “My teen earned a lot of alternative credit, so we are using ABC College for an associate degree. After that, we are transferring her degree to a ‘real’ university where she wants her bachelor’s degree.”
These are all variations of the same strategy: credit laundering.
Credit laundering is a term I started using in 2008 to explain the idea of moving credits through a middleman college or university in an attempt to “wash” the credits of their origin and get them accepted as new credits elsewhere. Parents think this is clever, but a registrar’s job is to source all credits back to their origin and evaluate them for their university. In other words, credit laundering doesn’t work—at least not how most people think it will.
The Easter Egg Analogy: Why Credit Laundering Fails
To understand why credit laundering doesn’t work, let’s use an Easter egg analogy.
Let’s suppose your student earns college credit from a variety of sources. Each source represents a different color egg.
🟥 CLEP credits are red eggs
🟦 Sophia credits are blue eggs
🟩 Dual enrollment credits are green eggs
🟪 Study.com credits are purple eggs
Now, imagine a college transcript is their Easter basket. You send all of the credits (eggs) to a college, and they are held on a transcript (the basket).
But no matter how many baskets they land in, how many times you send them from one place to the next, and no matter how they are carried, the egg color never changes.
🎯 Colleges ALWAYS look at the original color.
The person tasked with evaluating college credits on your transcript is the registrar. The job of the registrar is to dump out the basket. Once dumped out, they will determine if their college accepts that color egg.
💡 Changing baskets does NOT change egg color.
💥 The result? If a college doesn’t accept CLEP or Sophia directly, they still won’t accept it just because it appears on another college’s transcript, or part of an associate degree.
It’s at this stage that I have to tell you there are exceptions,but if you’re pursuing an exception, you must be incredibly careful that you follow the instructions perfectly.
The First Exception: Articulation Agreements (Golden Eggs!)
The one major exception to credit laundering is articulation agreements—official agreements between two colleges that allow seamless transfer of an entire degree.
🥚 Here’s how it works:
- A student earns an associate degree from College A.
- College A has a written agreement with College B that guarantees the degree will transfer perfectly as a 60-credit block of credit.
- College B accepts the entire degree, no questions asked.
- In this exception, your eggs are all painted gold. The eggs now represent a basket of undifferentiated eggs- they are golden eggs and will not be sorted by College B.
🌟 Key Takeaway:
✅ If an articulation agreement exists, your eggs are golden!
🚫 If no agreement exists, the eggs are dumped out and re-evaluated.
🔎 Common mistakes:
❌ 4-year colleges do not have articulation agreements with other 4-year colleges! Why would they? Any 4-year college that awards an associate degree will not have formed a pathway for you to earn the rest of your degree elsewhere.
❌ 2-year community colleges do have transfer agreements with 4-year colleges, but the specific TYPE of associate degree, and often the state you live in will determine how the agreement works. Do not make assumptions. If an articulation agreement exists, it will be in writing and you can read it. If you don’t read it, you can’t know if you’re qualified!
ALWAYS check for an articulation agreement before enrolling.
The Second Exception: Legitimate Credit Laundering
In very rare cases, certain organizations partner with colleges to issue transcripts in a way that makes their credit appear as original college credit.
💡 This is NOT the same as normal transfer credit. In normal transfer credit, the origin is identified; in a credit laundering partnership, the origin is concealed.
🚀 Examples of Legitimate Credit Laundering:
✅ Westcott Courses/Omega Math (through UMassGlobal)
✅ Veritas Press / Scholars Academy (through Cairn University)
✅ Classical Conversations Plus (through Southeastern University or The College at Southeastern)
✅ IEW Christian Halls (through Southeastern University or Donnelly College)
In those cases ^ the student purchases the courses through the company (Wescott, Veritas Press, etc.) but the credit is recorded on the partner college transcript as if your student took it directly with the college.
This is so rare and a topic that I follow so closely that I have only found six instances of legitimate credit laundering in 15 years of obsessive searching. (The four above, one that no longer exists, and one that is operating but their credits were discovered and don’t transfer.)
Final Thoughts: How to Avoid Credit Laundering Pitfalls
🔴 DON’T assume credits will transfer “better” just because they appear on a college transcript.
🔵 DO verify that your target college accepts credits in their original form.
🟡 DO research articulation agreements if planning to transfer an associate degree.
🟢 DO check the credit acceptance policies for where your teen intends to earn their bachelor’s degree. Whether or not they have an associate degree won’t matter.
💡 The best strategy? Earn college credit the right way—through dual enrollment, CLEP, AP, and accredited programs that your target college accepts upfront.
📣 Have questions about credit transfer? Drop a comment below! 🚀
I learned this lesson the hard way by paying for the Credit Bank at Excelsior only to find their Transcript One service no better than the free transcript via Credly. Both were rejected by my target school, the adult education college at an elite university.
However, I was able to transfer my Sophia credit to a community college, took two courses with the CC and earned an associates degree. My associates degree, along with the underlying credit, was accepted at my target school. Not the back door through adult education, rather as a transfer student through regular admissions.