About Community College Path
What is Community College Path?
Community College Path is a free tool for finding and comparing community college courses across Wisconsin. Search by subject or keyword, check which courses transfer to your target university, build a weekly schedule, and find late-start classes still open for registration.
What is Course Auditing?
Auditing a college course means attending classes without receiving a grade or academic credit. You participate in lectures, follow the material, and learn alongside enrolled students — but without exams, graded assignments, or GPA impact.
It's a way to explore subjects you're curious about, build skills for a career change, preview a program before committing, or simply learn something new.
Who Audits Courses?
- -Career explorers — testing a field before committing to a degree or certificate
- -Lifelong learners — pursuing interests in history, art, science, or any subject
- -Professionals — brushing up on skills or learning adjacent topics without needing credits
- -Students — previewing a challenging course before taking it for credit
- -Retirees and seniors — Wisconsin residents 60+ may qualify for free tuition under state law
How It Works at Wisconsin Community Colleges
Wisconsin's 16 community colleges (the WTCS system) generally allow course auditing, though policies vary by college. The typical process:
- 1Apply for admission at the college (even auditors need to be in the system)
- 2Browse available courses and pick the one you want to audit
- 3Submit a Course Audit Request form during the add/drop period
- 4Get instructor approval — some courses require a signature or email confirmation
- 5Attend classes and participate (no exams or grades)
What Does It Cost?
At most Wisconsin community colleges, audit students pay the same tuition and fees as credit students. Check each college's page for specific cost details.
Wisconsin 60+ Tuition Waiver
Wisconsin residents 60+ may audit technical college courses with no auditor's fee, space-available and with instructor approval (Wis. Stat. § 38.24(4m)); residents 62+ are exempt from program fees in vocational-adult programs (§ 38.24(1m)(b)). Material and special-course fees may still apply. We flag this on every college page with links to verify.
Things to Know
- Audited courses do not count toward a degree or appear on your transcript with a grade (you may receive an "AU" notation)
- Financial aid typically cannot be applied to audited courses
- Some courses (labs, clinicals, studios) may not be available for auditing
- You usually cannot switch from audit to credit (or vice versa) after the add/drop period
- Audit seats are subject to availability — credit-seeking students get priority
About Community College Path Wisconsin
Community College Path Wisconsin is a free tool that helps you search, compare, and plan community college courses across Wisconsin. We aggregate course listings from the WTCS system and pair them with transfer equivalency data and manually researched audit policies.
Every audit policy on this site includes a "last verified" date and a link to the source. Policies can change, so always confirm directly with the college before enrolling.
This is an independent project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the Wisconsin Technical College System.