Admission is accessible by design: minimum age 18, a high school diploma or equivalent, GED, HiSET, TASC, or CHSPE, English proficiency where secondary school was outside the US, and no standardized tests for most programs. Starts roll on Tuesdays roughly every five to six weeks, up to twenty per year at the bachelor's level and seventeen at the master's, so the next entry point is never more than a few weeks out. The technique is in the setup: transfer and prior-learning credit swept before day one, the right grading model chosen where a program offers both, and the week-two engagement wire respected from your first course.
The enrollment sequence, optimized
Sweep credit before choosing a start
Phoenix's Evaluation of Transfer Activity and Prior Learning Assessment convert past coursework, training, and experience into credit, and in Direct Assessment programs accepted credit lands as competency units. Every cleared course is roughly $1,364 to $2,635 kept, per the tuition manual.
Choose your model where one exists
The MBA, RN to BSN, MHA, and MIS run in both traditional and competency-based shapes. The three-systems manual maps the trade; choose from your calendar's honesty, not the brochure's enthusiasm.
Pick the Tuesday deliberately
With a start every five to six weeks, waiting for a livable window costs weeks, not semesters. Take the start whose first fortnight your life can actually hold, because of what comes next.
Respect the ARA wire from hour one
Post academically related activity in each course by the end of week two or be dropped; 28 days silent converts to W grades. It is trivial to satisfy and catastrophic to forget, and every engagement we run tracks it standing.
Nursing's extra doors
Nursing programs stack clinical requirements on the open-admission base: the RN to BSN carries 90 community and public-health clinical hours, non-NP MSN concentrations about 60, and the FNP and PMHNP tracks 600 supervised hours plus a required five-day residency in Phoenix, Arizona, with the DNP at 1,000 practice hours. None of that changes the application's simplicity; all of it changes the planning, and the nursing desk schedules coursework around those fixed points as a matter of course.
Starting strong in a one-course system
- Your first course is one hundred percent of your academic load: treat its week one like a launch, not a warm-up
- GEN/201, the common first stop, teaches Phoenix's expectations explicitly; bank the easy A and keep the rubric habits
- Map the whole five weeks on day one; short courses forgive no discovered surprises
- Set the next start date before finishing the current course; gapless stacking is the honest pace lever
A Tuesday is always coming
Send your program and transcript situation. The credit-sweep plan and first-course map come back free.
Sources and verification
Facts on this page come from official and independent sources, and anything that matters is worth checking against the originals:
- www.phoenix.edu: the University of Phoenix official site, the primary source for program, tuition, and policy facts
- www.hlcommission.org: Higher Learning Commission, the institutional accreditor
- www.ccneaccreditation.org: Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education, the nursing accreditor
- apastyle.apa.org: APA Style, the official style authority behind the formatting rules