I wrote dismissive.
In response to a post criticizing the $100k number. While technically true, it completely misses other sizable tuition discounts. Which were even mentioned in the post you responded to:
E.g. Yale expects zero family contribution for students from families making under $75k. Just not because of scholarships.
The value of collecting all the stronger students in a selective school isn’t in the curriculum, its in the ability to say “I was in a school that only admits strong students”. Community colleges don’t have a strong honors program because the vast majority of students who could use an honors program wouldn’t be caught dead at a 2 year CC.
If the concept of Trophy or Selective colleges was changed, and most post-HS students went to CC for a couple of years, there would be plenty of students interested in a tough writing intensive course or an accelerated Physics 101-102-103 track.
Just to caveat this stat a bit, not all students enroll in community colleges intending to pursue a university degree. Many seek certificates or associates as their terminal degree, and increasingly community colleges themselves are offering baccalaureates in applied fields like nursing.
But it underscores another point about community colleges – they’re already subject to a tremendous amount of “mission creep.” At least where I’m from, they’re providing remedial education to students who emerged from K-12 barely literate. They’re providing vocational training across a range of industries, with all the specialized equipment and instruction that entails. They’re providing an enormous amount of dual credit academic instruction in public high schools. Adding “be freshman year for universities” to that list would stretch them even further. I’m a fan of community colleges, but this is a recipe for doing more and more things less and less well.
Advanced classes can still provide a significant advantage even if they don’t directly apply to college credit in the student’s major. Taking AP classes preps the student for college-level class work and will make the student more attractive for admission. They will be eligible for more scholarships. And being able to cut down on the electives means the student will be able to take a lighter course load. They can focus more on classes in their major or classes they are passionate about. Even if they still take 4 years to complete their degree, they will be able to do it with less stress and more flexibility.
The more I think about it, the less I think going to CC first makes sense. The savvy student who does the first 2 years at CC will likely be a savvy student at a 4-year college who would graduate and be able to pay off the debt. That kind of student would likely graduate with a reasonable debt and would gain more personal development from being in a 4-year program. Rather than trying to get a budget degree by splitting it between CC and college, I think they would be better off overall going all 4 years at college even though they would be more in debt.
This may be even more a factor with poor students who have more cultural inertia to overcome. A poor student who initially goes to CC while living at home won’t really have the same personally transformative experience as living on the college campus for the full 4 years. I would think they would still have a “living poor” mindset if they went the cheap, CC route and would be less likely to get the full benefit of their degree. Provided they can graduate with a reasonable debt ($40k-$50k?), the extra cost of traditional college would be a better investment.
Not to contradict any of the good points you and others have made, but large universities also have multiple missions. At least if you take freshman-level classes at a community college, you’re likely to have relatively small classes taught by someone who was actually hired to teach.
Trophy colleges recruit nationally, while CCs recruit locally. Are there really going to be enough students qualifying for the advanced classes to make them feasible?
My very large high school was extremely tracked, and I had a much better high school experience than most. I don’t know about the ones who didn’t get in the top classes, and I believe this is no longer a popular strategy because of charges of elitism. Would the tracking of CCs be politically feasible?
The halo effect of going to a trophy school exists, but there are a lot more benefits than that, such as exposure to famous professors, trust that you can handle advanced work, and exposure to research.
To clarify, many CCs DO have honors programs, which can be quite academically rigorous (though not, obviously, in the way that MIT or the University of Chicago is rigorous – the number of students with that level of academic preparation simply isn’t there). I didn’t bring this up simply as a theoretical possibility, it’s a thing that actually exists and works well for many students – although there are many others who are better off going farther from home and / or being at a more selective school, for all kinds of reasons, even if the cost is higher. (What I think gets lost in a lot of these conversations is that students – and faculty, and institutions, and majors – aren’t interchangeable widgets; there are lots of different paths to a bachelor’s degree, and there need to be.)
Community college can be a good plan in some cases. My niece has an unusual education history. She was home schooled until she was 18. Never took the SAT. She got into the local CC. Did well in her classes, so after two years she transferred to the 4 year state university, majoring in math. She’s now going for her Ph.D. in math at a prestigious private university.
On our pre-Covid road trip we stopped in a residential CC in Western Wyoming to see their dinosaurs. The place was beautiful, with fantastic art. I did not research their academic quality, but one of the things we saw was a replica of an Easter Island head which they built to experiment with ways the Easter Islanders could have moved them, which is awesome. That’s a place with a good residential experience also.
I don’t really disagree with any of this, as long as high school college-credit classes (variously called “dual credit” or “dual enrollment”) are taken thoughtfully and with realistic expectations. In Texas, which I’m familiar with, dual credit courses have exploded – there are community colleges who now get half their enrollments from high schoolers taking college coursework.
Parents and students tend to see dual credit as an unalloyed good thing, but there are real challenges that students need to be aware of. Poor grades or withdrawals from dual credit courses can follow the student throughout their postsecondary career, lowering their GPA or counting against withdrawal limits. Students cannot receive financial aid for college coursework taken before high school graduation, yet those courses may count against lifetime limits on aid eligibility or the number of hours that qualify for in-state tuition. And whether and how those credits will transfer can be incredibly complex, differing from course to course, institution to institution and major to major.
I had honors, and I went to a 2 year college because I couldn’t afford university. Graduated with honors in computer/electronic engineering, then went to a good university and studied physics.
The 2-year college was harder. The university gave me a full two years of transfer credit for my two years at college. That included calculus through differential equations, linear and boolean algebra, complex functions, plus the whole panoply of courses required to be a certified professional in electronics. We had 30-35 hours of classes and labs per week. At university I had 15-20. And we had to do a summer session each year to cram in all the material we needed.
Of course, the same college offered all kinds of courses from nursing down to flower arranging. But then universities offer a lot of pablum as well.
Almost all the people in my class were ‘university material’. They went to a 2-year college simply because they wanted more active careers working with their hands, or because they couldn’t afford university. It had nothing to do with their inability to handle hard college material. The college stuff was easily as hard as most faculties in university. About the same as university engineering programs.
You replied to me but quoted Cheesesteak, so I don’t know what’s going on.
If we’re doing anecdotes, my daughter took a stat class in our local CC when she was in high school. She found that the only students who gave a shit were her and some adults. My wife took a writing class - again the 50% of the class who were traditional CC students never showed up.
Before ACA you had to be a student to stay on your parents medical insurance, so we knew kids who registered for CC (it’s cheap) just to get the insurance, and never attended any classes.
One theory was to save money the kid would go there for two years and then move to Cal, though our four year colleges, while way too expensive compared to the old days, are still not that expensive. I can see that, though there is a risk of a kid falling into the habits of fellow students who slacked off, but the parents I know who did that were solidly middle class and tended to buy cars during this period. None of the kids I knew who did this ever made it to a four year school though I suspect it was possible.
Our big problem is that each student at a CC gets the same amount of money from the state, which makes it hard for departments like nursing to admit as many students as they need to, since teaching a nursing student is a lot more expensive than teaching a math student. Ditto for the vocational type degrees. So I think they need more money.
Was this in the US? In the last 30 years?
I’ve been a student, an instructor and a tutor at three different community colleges and my experience in all three was that most of the students were not ready for college level work and what the curriculum said vs what was actually taught and expected to be mastered was a yawning gap.
You could certainly pass college algebra at the CC I tutored at and not be at the level of getting a C in GCSE Maths in the UK.
There were a minority of students (less than 10% for sure) who were there with a view toward going on to a four year college, but even with the best efforts of the counselors I don’t think too many transferred after two years with the amount of credits where they could realistically graduate after two more years at a decent university.
There are lots of students at Community College taking light programs or one-off courses that are not particularly challenging.
In the middle are the serious trade programs that requure doing lots of work, but aren’t particularly academically challenging. Nursing, plumbing, electrician, auto mechanics, etc.
Then there are engineering technology programs that range the gamut from one-year technician programs to 2-year associates’ degrees and university transfer programs in svience and engineering. That’s what I took, and they were necessarily every bit as hard as university. The curricula are even approved by the universities as part of the transfer credit program. But because you have to learn all the university stuff plus the practcal stuff required to work as a technologist right out of the gate, the amount of material you have to learn is greater.
We had more advanced math than what is required for a degree in Comp Sci today. In two years I had Calculus I, Calculus II, Differential equations, linear algebra, boolean algebra, and complex functions. All but the Diff EQ were university courses with university textbooks. Differential equations included partial differential equations but with a focus on electronics applications. I got crefit for the first two years of math in the physics program at the U of A.
All this plus assembler and C programming, communications theory I and II, digital and analog circuit design I and II, computer architecture I and II, data structures, technical writing, electronic drafting and circuit board design, solid state theory, and five labs per week.
We had a lot of dropouts.
No, and no. This was in Canada, in the 1980’s. Looking at a similar program today, they have watered down the math a bit and added more technologies you have to learn.
Here’s the current curriculum for Computer Engineering Technology at NAIT:
CMPE1000 Basic Electricity
CMPE1100 Workplace Skills and Safety
CMPE1300 Fundamentals of Programming
CMPE1550 Digital Logic
COMM1000T Technical Communications
MATH1106 Technical Mathematics, Calculus I and Statistics
CMPE1250 Embedded System Fundamentals
CMPE1400 Semiconductors
CMPE1666 Intermediate Programming
CMPE2000 Web Technologies
CMPE2400 Databases
MATH1200 Calculus II
CMPE2100 Hardware Interfacing
CMPE2150 Practical Electronics
CMPE2250 Embedded System Applications
CMPE2300 Object-Oriented Programming
CMPE2550 Web Applications
CMPE2600 Process Automation
CMPE2700 Communication and Networking
CMPE2750 Embedded System Design
CMPE2800 Advanced Programming
CMPE2850 Programming Languages
CMPE2965 Technical Project
That’s a 2-year program leading to an Engineering Technologist credential that qualifies for professional accreditation. It’s also a 2-year transfer into a 4-year engineering degree if you want.
I’d say the workload is as high or higher than a CS degree, not quite as high as an enginnering degree. College math focuses more on practical applications, while in physics it was more about foundations, proofs, etc. But it’s the same math.
Humanities faculties at university are a breeze compared to any of these programs in college or university.
In Texas, state funding for community college uses a cost-based weighted enrollment formula for precisely this reason. I’m surprised to hear that California does not. Why would the CCs ever offer more expensive programs?
6 high load courses a term seems like a lot - more than most 4 year colleges require. No wonder there are lots of dropouts.
When I was at Bell Labs we had a special category for those with associate degrees. We did rigorous recruiting and we got really good people, several of whom went on to get bachelors and masters degrees paid for by AT&T. They had great programming skills but not a lot of depth in computer science - though they were fast learners.
That sounds about right.
The thing is, community colleges run the gamut. NAIT actually offers numerous bachelor’s degrees, including one in petroleum engineering, one of the highest paying jobs you can get with a four year degree.
But you can also take short or medium length programs for all kinds of things of questionable value at many of them. The ‘community’ part is that they are often tasked with coming up with education programs to cover local shortfalls. In a farming area they might have courses on animal husbandry or heavy equipment mechanics. In other communities it might be hairdressing, arts, and small business management.