The Last 100 Posts

The school year has begun in earnest for most of our teens, and for those at the end of their K-12 journey, the future is looming ahead. What’s next? College, military, work??? For those considering furthering their education at some level, then next question is “How do I pay for it?” Fortunately, there are millions of dollars out there to compete for. I have taken to using AI to help generate these lists of scholarships each month, but I check (and correct) every link before I send this off to post. However, please note that, on occasion, application submissions are cut off at a certain number and deadlines change, so always double check the scholarship website for the most up to date information.

Continue reading “September 2026 Scholarships and Contests” →

Often, a “good” high school writer struggles in ENG 101 while a student who didn’t do well in high school language arts finally finds success. What is it about ENG 101 that is so dramatically different from high school language arts, and how can you help your teen come through ENG 101 with success?

Continue reading “Why Good Writers Struggle in ENG 101” →

“I am sorry for the silly question, but my daughter starts her first in-person dual enrollment class next week. What should she wear? Should it be regular teen style, or more professional?”

Continue reading “Parent Question: What should my daughter wear to her dual enrollment class?” →

It’s the middle of summer, which means it’s intern season for Homeschooling for College Credit. Our five teens this summer span from coast to coast. As a nonprofit organization run entirely by volunteers, these interns have their hands full! Over the 6-week program, they will write articles for our website, fact-check valuable dual enrollment lists, update state-by-state information, make videos, and even learn to use AI in a professional capacity. We are so proud of these young teens!

To qualify for the internship, applicants must already have a minimum of 9 college credits, have parents participating in our Facebook groups, and complete an application. Each year we have several dozen applicants!

Our interns will each receive a $500 scholarship, certificate of completion, 2 letters of recommendation, and documentation of their work to use for college and career applications. These teens are shining examples of the Homeschooling for College Credit program, and we honor their participation!

Internship program applications open each February. To qualify, students must be rising 10th-12th graders, have at least 9 college credits, and have a parent who is a member of our Facebook community.

August is often the time we start gearing up for school. As you and your teens work on scholarships, it’s a good idea to get some organization prepared. I want to share some ideas I have gleaned from numerous sources over the past several years of preparing these scholarship posts:

• Set aside dedicated time on a regular basis with your student to find scholarships that your student can apply for.
• Create a calendar of scholarship due dates to apply for.
• Create a spreadsheet to keep everything organized. Include columns for: Scholarship Name (a hyperlink here is useful), Award Amount, Deadline, Essay (Yes/No, word count, topic, whatever notes you need for this column), Date Submitted, Notes.

I did not start the suggested spreadsheet when my son started applying for scholarships. This resulted in the experience of repeatedly reminding him to apply for a certain scholarship; him “thinking” he already did, but the only record he had of it was the date he saved the essay on his computer. Therefore, he assumed he had applied for the scholarship. Lesson learned.

Having all of the items I listed in a spreadsheet will reduce confusion, allow student and parent to easily see the scholarships applied for, and keep this often chaotic process, due to the number of scholarships available, manageable and organized.

To get you started, here are some scholarships available with August deadlines:

When my four teens were earning college credit, we were on the tightest of tight budgets! So finding free and low-cost college credit is a special hobby of mine. Every year I create a mini-guide of all the freebies. Here is the guide for 2026-2027.

Continue reading “Free College Credit 2026-2027” →

As soon as you start chatting with other parents of teens, you’ll immediately begin hearing the terms “dual enrollment” or “PSEO” or “dual credit” and others. If you’re confused, that’s fair! The terms can be incredibly confusing, but this post will quickly clear it up!

Continue reading “Dual Enrollment Vocabulary” →

Yes, summer is here, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of scholarships out there to apply for! Also, I found a great resource for scholarships…not your typical scholarship search site that I usually highlight, though it does list some scholarships. The site is UcanGo2.org. This is an Oklahoma state resource, but it looks to have a treasure trove of resources. For example, at the bottom of the Financial Aid page are great resource downloads like a Scholarship Success Guide, a scholarship tracker (which I printed out for my son to use), essay tips, and a few others. Within the website there is information on high school planning, career planning, as well as exploring jobs, colleges, programs, and majors, etc. I can’t wait to explore all that this newly found site has to offer!

I’ve created a little mini-series newsletter called 10 Days of Creative College Funding! It’s totally free. You’ll find the first issue below.

Continue reading “10 Days of Creative College Funding” →

Most of us use ChatGPT for simple one-off tasks, but I want to show you how to turn your ChatGPT into a tool you can use again and again. In this video, I’ll show you how I used ChatGPT for a task I was working on and then used it to create a master prompt so we could do it again, and again, and again.

As fall planning is probably already on your radar, I wanted to bring you 30 college credits to choose from if your teen needs a fine arts or design credit. This list includes a mix of college courses and credit-by-exam, both Christian and secular. All options are available to homeschool students in any state, and they are asynchronous, so your student doesn’t have to be online at a specific time. All available with discounted tuition through Homeschooling for College Credit’s HS4CC Academy. Happy planning!

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The difference between homeschooling K-8 and high school is the requirement to keep a high school transcript. This is a big and intimidating process if it’s your first time, but it’s not our first time. We got you. Investing a half hour now will cover you for most of high school, and you’ll be SO GLAD you have this off your plate as your student begins high school.

If you’ve ever heard people talking about “degree plans” and didn’t understand what that meant, this post is for you. A degree plan is simply a list of very carefully selected courses that line up to a specific degree. This is usually done using very low-cost credit with the intention of enrolling later and having a good portion of the degree finished before starting. In this example, I wanted to use our new Scholarship from Google to maximize a degree that incorporates as much credit from Google as possible. I’m excited to show you what I landed on!

Continue reading “Management Degree: 75% for <$1000” →

Cynde’s story is already amazing because her son earned the allowable 90 college credits that Liberty University will accept towards a 120-credit bachelor’s degree (75%), but if you look carefully at this post title, you’ll see her son successfully brought in 101 credits, which is more than “allowed” and resulted in saving her family another $4,000. How did she do that? I’m glad you asked!

Continue reading “High School Graduate, 101 Successful Credits” →

This was a question I received via email today, and the perfect subject of a very important consideration when planning a course sequence for your student.

There are two times when choosing dual enrollment courses in a specific sequence really does matter.

(1) The sequence is tied to the level of difficulty

Course sequences can be tracked for level of difficulty. For example, a student who takes Calculus I at their local community college in 11th grade high school may encounter transfer problems if they take Precalculus at the community college in 12th grade. Since Precalculus is generally taken first, this “backward” sequence may be disqualified as a “duplication of credit” since the knowledge was “already demonstrated” when they passed Calculus I. So while these two classes are genuinely different and do not duplicate each other in a normal situation, taking them in reverse order may cause problems.

• Nuance #1: This is not true if the Calculus I course is a high school course and the Precalculus is a college course. High school and college courses do NOT ever duplicate each other for college credit.
• Nuance #2: There are plenty of colleges that don’t care about sequence and will give you college credit for every non-duplicating credit earned, and in any order.
• Best Practice: Follow a traditional progression where applicable.

(2) The sequence is a 2-part course

College courses, unlike high school courses, always run on a 1-semester cycle. While a high school course often takes a full year (2 semesters), this is not the case in a college schedule. All college classes take 1 semester, so when a course was written to cover a 2-semester scope and sequence, a high school student may not be advised to complete the sequence because they are not in a degree program. This is a small pitfall that leaves high school students at a disadvantage because a dual enrollment advisor won’t be mapping the student’s courses to a degree; they will just be managing the immediate enrollment needs of the student.

For example, General Biology 1 with Lab and General Biology 2 with Lab, taken through a college, are intentionally designed to cover the full scope and sequence over 2 semesters. These courses are usually taught using the same textbook, the same professor, and may even meet at the same scheduled time. These two classes “go together” and are intended to be completed in a set. If a student looks at the prerequisites for General Biology 2 with Lab, it very likely requires completion of General Biology 1 with Lab.

• Nuance #1: There are dual enrollment programs that offer part 1 of a course and not part 2, even when both parts are offered by the college or university. I don’t know why they do this, but if you see the course offerings and notice a broken sequence, you should ask if your student will have access to the second part. If they don’t, it is better to use a different dual enrollment program that allows access to both parts.
• Nuance #2: Sometimes a student earns college credit by exam (AP, DSST, CLEP) and the college awards credit for part 1 or part 2, but not both parts. You should try to close the sequence gap so your student ends up with credit for both parts, even if that means taking an extra class or exam.
• Nuance #3: There are plenty of colleges that don’t care and will award credit for one or the other even when both are not taken.
• Best Practice: Take both parts from the same college in the same school year.

Not a “Real” Sequence

There are plenty of examples of college course numbers that follow each other (102, 103, 104…), but are not actually a sequence. You’ll be able to identify these examples when the subject jumps from one to the next, or when they do not have prerequisites that dictate the progression. When this happens, this is not a real sequence, and you can disregard the need to take both parts.

Example:

• HIST101, United States History 1 (prereq: none)
• HIST102, United States History 2 (prereq: none)
• HIST 105, Civil War and Reconstruction (prereq: none)
• HIST 109, World History 1 (prereq: none)
• HIST 110, World History 2 (prereq: none)

In this history course catalog, you see that the numbers get higher, that there are a few “part 1” type of courses, but since none have prerequisites, this allows any student to take any of these courses in any order they like. This is because the prereq requirement (none) is telling you that the course does not build on content from an earlier course, and therefore it is NOT a sequence.

Best Practices vs Rules

In high school, while your student is still a few years away from heading to college for a degree, the guidance given by Homeschooling for College Credit is considered our “best practice” advice because it helps most students, most of the time, at most colleges. With 4,000 colleges and universities in this country, it’s not the same as getting specific advice for your specific situation. When your student has a specific college picked out, our “best practice” advice should now take a back seat to the actual rules and policies of that college. In that case, seeking specific advise for your specific situation becomes possible. In reality, it is the big mistakes that parents make, not the small, obscure loopholes, that prevent credit from transferring. Homeschooling for College Credit advice will always help you avoid big mistakes.

Not enough scholarship databases yet? Here’s another that I’ll shine the spotlight on: Big Future Scholarship Search. Big Future Scholarship Search is an offshoot of collegeboard.org, and, according to their FAQ page, “is a tool that allows you to create a profile with standard information requested by many college scholarship applications. This profile is used to match you with scholarships that you’re eligible for based on their requirements. You’ll be able to reuse the information for other applications without having to retype your personal information for each subsequent application.”

Continue reading “Scholarships & Contests: June 2026” →

The AAMC reports that most doctors knew they wanted to become doctors as early as middle school! If that’s true in your home, and you have an aspiring doctor, there are some aspects of your Homeschooling for College Credit program that you’ll want to monitor closely so your student’s early college credit can be used later. I’ll give you the admissions requirements for med school as well, so you can begin planning.

Continue reading “Homeschooling for Pre-Med: Key Steps to Success” →

There isn’t a college degree that doesn’t require English credit! Whether your student is looking at an Associate (2-year) degree or a Bachelor’s (4-year) degree, chances are incredibly high that they will need 6 college credits of English Composition. The benefits of taking these courses now is that (a) it’s a fraction of the cost, (b) you can help them learn how to do college while still at home (c) this very time-consuming class will be finished by the time they start their degree! Here are 3 ways to do this in 12th grade.

Continue reading “3 Awesome Ways to Oursource English Composition in 12th Grade” →

It’s almost time for Advanced Placement testing! Here’s what you can expect from scores, whether you’re using AP for college credit or admissions.

Continue reading “AP for College Credit….or Admissions?” →

This month’s website spotlight is The University Network (tun). TUN has a ton to offer! (Pardon the pun, I couldn’t resist.) In addition to search engines specific to scholarships, free courses, internships, and student discounts, they also have a resources section which includes a FAFSA Guide, College Admissions articles for “every step of the way,” and school profiles. In addition to the online resources, the website also has TUN TV where you can “watch exclusive interviews with education thought leaders.”

Although I am sure you are use to the scholarship search engines, as they are all pretty similar, I probably got your attention with the free course search engine mentioned! TUN has a search engine that is specific to (over 6,000) free courses, as well as quick links to free courses from top schools like Harvard, Yale, and MIT.

This exam is no joke. It has the lowest pass rate of any CLEP exam and is an extreme outlier. Most CLEP exam pass rates are 50-90%, but Chemistry is only around 25%, so when Homeschooling for College Credit mom Amy sent me an email that her son Daniel passed the CLEP College Chemistry exam and successfully transferred it to his university, I had to get the details of what they did. Here is exactly what they did.

Continue reading “CLEP College Chemistry” →

This year’s guide is jam-packed with hundreds (thousands) of college credits, all free for the taking. We lost some programs from last year, but picked up a couple of new ones this year. A resourceful HS4CC parent could build an entire Homeschooling for College Credit program using free college credits. If this sounds exciting, grab the guide and bring down the cost of college.

My #4 son knew early on that he wanted to be a welder. Before we even started high school, I’d gathered every possible industrial arts curriculum or program I could find (spoiler: there aren’t many!), but then I stumbled upon an amazing safety training company that offers **free** courses. I lost count of how many we used in our homeschool, but it was well over 10. And yes, I’ll show you how you can award high school credit for these, too!

Continue reading “Teen Headed into Trades? Safety Training Available Now” →