This was a difficult but rewarding experience. The faculty was excellent, the Chair flexible, allowing me to do a field-oriented study of an antipsychotic drug that was new and untested in several areas. Faculty was supportive and helpful, I RECOMMEND THE university to anyone already established in a career, but needing additional learning and accreditation to advance.

I am a recent graduate of Cal Coast University who earned a BS degree in Psychology.

The positives of CCU include the affordability, flexibility and convenience of working on a degree in a stress free asynchronous environment. The downside is that their accreditation is only "national" and not regional, which may impact the transfer of credits, professional licensing, and the credibility of the degree for those who live in certain states that do not recognize non-regional college degrees.

The course work at CCU is not on-line based, but correspondence based, and you have study guides where you submit exams and compose a few essay questions before taking a final exam to complete a course. Books are not included, but they do have a library you can rent them from or you can buy your own off of Amazon or E-Bay.

The staff are really helpful should you need them. However, there is virtually no teacher-student interaction, as it is a correspondence based program where you read the text and study guides, then complete the exams and write your essays. No deadlines on assignments and you can take as many classes as you want at one time.

Some of the courses range in difficulty from "moderately challenging" to "painfully easy." You can get through the program without too much effort with some of the courses, which sort of undermines the whole learning experience. The general electives were actually a little more challenging for me personally than the actual psychology courses. You must complete a minimum of two courses per year, but this is an easy task to accomplish.

I can recommend this school, but I suggest you check with your local area to ensure that the degree will be recognized for employment and or other professional purposes before committing to their psychology degree program.

CCU was a great experience for me; I am definitely an independent learner, so the self-study plan was good for me; what made it even better was the fact that I could go at my own pace; some courses like this have a mandated schedule you must follow even in a distance course. The materials provided were good preparation for evaluation, but more importantly I felt California Coast University had priced them fairly. I had a few credits (one year’s worth) to be transferred from another university, but California Coast University seemed to take an unreasonable length of time to carry this out; I was promised it would be done in two weeks, but it ended up being well over a month. This was somewhat alleviated by the fact that there is continuous enrollment in the courses so I didn’t have to wait until the next semester to start doing coursework. I feel that the program prepared me well to continue my education; the focus on self-sufficiency and motivation are very important in helping me do well in my graduate studies in psychology.