EU - BSLA

[rachel83az]

Excelsior is a good choice for many students. Their tuition is marginally lower than TESU's, once all credits are gathered from alt sources. But there are, indeed, a few reasons why a student on this forum might choose TESU instead.

1. Per transcript fees - Excelsior charges $300 for every evaluation after the first. If it takes you 3 or 4 additional evaluations before you have sufficient credit in the right areas, that's an extra thousand bucks you're paying for your Excelsior degree. It's no longer cheaper than TESU.
   
2. Fewer UL credit - Excelsior requires 30 UL credits. Both the capstone and cornerstone can count as UL credit at Excelsior, but that still leaves students with 24 UL credits needed from elsewhere. TESU, on the other hand, only requires 15 UL credits + capstone. UL credits can be significantly more expensive/time-consuming than LL credits. This can sometimes make a TESU degree both cheaper and faster than an Excelsior degree. 
   
3. More transparency - It's unclear how much this is going to change on the 12th, but TESU has traditionally had extremely clear requirements for its degrees (for the most part). Although the public site for TESU isn't the clearest now, there is still a lot of information there. Excelsior doesn't even publish what CLEP/DSST exams it accepts and for what. Students have reported that the official Sophia/Excelsior transfer page isn't 100% accurate. This tends to make it more difficult to plan an Excelsior degree compared to a TESU degree.
   
4. Momentum - Because more students tend to choose TESU, that makes it easier for other students to choose TESU. Without students reporting what different classes work for, the wiki cannot grow. This is illustrated most clearly on the Coopersmith page. Many more students have reported TESU transfers than Excelsior transfers. It's a lot easier for students to take one leap of faith and take a single class that may or may not work than it is to take 3 or 4 classes without knowing for certain if they'll even work for your degree.
   
5. Degree options - At Excelsior, most students must choose between either liberal studies or generic Business degrees. TESU has significantly more options. About 20 different degrees are available, with varying amounts of difficulty in obtaining each one. 
   
6. Name - Until recently, Excelsior was a college and TESU was a university. For some students, especially international ones, that matters a lot.
   
7. Cost - IMO, most students who would traditionally have flocked to Excelsior over TESU because of the slightly lower price tag have now been turning to UMPI. The prospect of finishing a degree for less than half the price of TESU or Excelsior has been too good to pass up. Students who do maximum credit but who work slowly can still typically expect to finish a UMPI degree for at least a bit less than the cost of either TESU or Excelsior. This is a win-win prospect. 
   

None of the above makes Excelsior a bad choice. Indeed, they're the right choice for many students. Unlike TESU, Excelsior does not have weird residency waiver fees that can make things confusing. They also don't require a minimum amount of RA credit. Not everyone wants to juggle adding Finnish university credits (or cheap CC credits/TECEPs, etc.) to their degree plan as they might have to do with TESU. That's fine. Excelsior also accepts NA credit, something that's super important to a lot of students.

Really, it all boils down to what's most important for you and your needs.