I’ve been meaning to ask this for a while. I know that the SDMB is ostensibly filled with an absurdly high number of self-proclaimed medical doctors, Ph.D candidates, and Ivy League graduates, but disregarding all of that…what do you guys think of community college? Do you really think that it is truly the “bad” kind of college that only “losers” go to (as the stigma suggests)?
I’m just curious. I go to one for absolutely no other reason than to save money, but I will admit that I was hugely reticent when I first started because my high school teachers had so successfully managed to drill into my head the idea that CC’s are only for losers. After my first semester concluded, though, that concern essentially evaporated.
I took some courses at a CC when I thought I would be entering into the nursing profession. This was after graduating with a BA from a 4-year private college. I thought the courses were a little easier at the CC, and I was treating them as a means to an end.
I also have a friend who started out at a community college to get his grades up and then transfer to a university.
I think a CC degree is one you’re going to want to upgrade from, if only because the prestige isn’t there.
CC is what you make of it. It can be a great venue for slacking off and smoking weed while your parents beg you to apply yourself. It can also be an excellent (and cheap) way to build credits for transfer to a four-year program later. (The 101s at your local CC are going to cover all the same stuff as the equivalent courses at a $35,000 per year private school, so you might as well save some cash.)
Depending on how well the curriculum is integrated with your local public universities, an associate’s program can sometimes be used as an equivalency for your first two years of a baccalaureate program without having to worry about individual credit transfers. (Even if not, unless you take a lot of underwater basketweaving or whatever, your credits will probably transfer fine.)
They serve a role, but they’re risky. They can be used an inexpensive way to complete a lot of basic requirements for a four-year degree or a way to reenter academics after an absence. An Associate’s degree isn’t very useful itself.
The problem is that, in my experience, CC isn’t comparable to “real” college. CC usually isn’t as rigorous or demanding, and you’re not learning the habits and personal connections you need to succeed at a four-year school. A student who completes an AA then transfers to a university expecting to quickly earn a Bacholor’s is often going to find that they’re taking a massively more difficult course load, dealing with an internal culture they’re not familiar with, and have no support system of known faculty or other students.
I started at four-year in a bad mental state, went to CC to complete some gen eds and improve my GPA, then transferred back to another four-year to complete my BA. It worked.
At the local state university, ranked within the top 5 public universities in the country, the largest contingent of graduates are those students who transferred over from community college.
If what you want is a bachelor’s degree and maybe a graduate or professional degree of some sort, then what you need to do is take the hardest courses available at your community college, get the best grades in them you can, get accepted at the best four-year college you can, get the best grades in the hardest courses there you can, and get into the best professional or graduate program you can (or find the best job with a bachelor’s degree if that’s what you want to do). Do you seriously think anybody is going to say in the future, looking at your transcript, “So you got a 4.0 at the Round Rock campus of Austin Community College, a 4.0 at the University of Texas, a 4.0 in your graduate work at Harvard, a brilliant Ph.D. thesis, and the best recommendations from your professors in grad school I’ve ever seen. However, I can’t offer you a job. We don’t accept anyone who ever went to a community college”? (Substitute the local community college, the nearest big state university, and the top graduate department (or professional school) in your field for the names I just gave.)
Nobody will care where you studied in your first two years of college as long as you do well there, do well at the university where you transferred to for the last two years, and do well at graduate or professional school, just like nobody is going to care where you went to high school at that point either. Even if you stop at a bachelor’s degree, the grades (and what courses you took) at the four-year college you transferred to during those last two years are going to be more important that how well you did during those two years at the community college. The point is to do as well as you can with what you have. If you were in high school considering whether to go to a community college or a pretty good state university, I would recommend the university. That’s not what you’re asking though. Heck, if were possible to redo your entire life, I would recommend that you be born in a rich family, go to the best pre-school, private elementary school, prep school, top-notch university, best graduate or professional school, and have the connections to be offered a great job. You can’t redo your life though. You have to settle for what you have at the moment. You then do as well as you can with that, hoping to get better things in the future.
Au contraire, mon frère! According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, jobs that require only an associate degree are growing faster than jobs that require bachelor’s degrees. (I work for an associate-degree-granting institution.)
About half of our enrollment is in associate of applied science degrees (e.g., not transfer degrees), and our graduates by and large have no trouble getting jobs in their fields.
You can be a registered nurse, respiratory therapist, physical therapy assistant, or dental hygienist with an associates degree. I’m an LPN (vocational school!) and I am getting ready to go back to a community college for my RN. Most nurses I know have gone the CC route.
No one cares where you went to school your first two years only where your bachelors came from.
After your first job most people don’t care where you went to school.
If you’re looking to impress people, going to a community college is probably not the way to go.
If you’re looking to get a good education, at the freshman/sophomore level, you may have at least as good a shot at a community college as at a large, prestigious university, where as a freshman you may possibly be taught by graduate students who can barely speak English, or by professors who would rather be researching, in large lecture halls of literally hundreds of students.
Your mileage may vary, of course. Some community colleges (and some programs, classes, etc. within a CC) are better than others.
One problem with community colleges is that budget cuts may make it difficult for you to schedule all the classes you want or need to take. But aside from that, I agree that they can be a good way to save money on college.
I’m a fan. They’re a good way to deal with your general ed/core courses inexpensively for people who intend to get a four-year degree, and provide excellent career training for people who don’t.
My daughter went to the local CC for a couple of years, and then transferred to a four year college to get her bachelor’s.
Our accountant did the same thing, except that he went to a third school to get his master’s.
I think that most of the state run community colleges can be a good deal. I have a pretty low opinion of many of the for-profit “technical” colleges, though…it seems like they’ll accept anyone, and give anyone an AA.
I’m a fan for all the reason people have mentioned above, plus a couple more.
When I started at community college, I had no idea what I wanted to do. There were half a dozen different fields I was interested in, so I declared a ‘general studies’ major and went and took classes in them all. By the end of it, I decided I got along well with computers and didn’t actually want to make a career of writing. Learning the same lesson at a four-year school could have been expensive.
Yes, it was a step less difficult than the four-year college I eventually went to, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing. It’s a good stepping stone. All the 101 level classes had no more than forty students and were all actually taught by professors. I don’t think I ever really had a bad professor at the community college - they didn’t give tenure, and didn’t keep bad teachers around. I had several at the four-year college.
Washington State has a program called Running Start, where high school students in their junior and senior years can take classes at community colleges, with the school district picking up the tab, and gain both high school and college credit for them. Most of the home schoolers I knew took advantage of that. Several of us got AA degrees at age 18 - no worries about not having an ‘official’ high school diploma there! Plus it was a good solution to the dilemma of ‘Mom can’t teach at that level’ vs. ‘Ugh, high school sounds like torture’.
My parents got some flack from wealthy relatives - “Well if she’s ready for college, why don’t you just send her to one?” Well, a) I wasn’t ready to move away from home at age 16 and b) it’s feckin’ expensive! Meh. They shut up when they saw it was working well.
When I went much of my credits didn’t transfer to the state 4 year college system. So that was a problem. Aside from that it was mostly made up of working adults and young kids, as opposed to the 4 year college school which was almost all young kids. I preferred the latter, for some reason it felt more like a community. Being on a large 4 year campus has a different, more encompassing feel than a community college. Of course it is more expensive but that is obvious. For me it was worth it though.
Nothing wrong with community college, the tuition is low. It isn’t for losers or anything, I don’t know where that concept started (although again the more academically minded probably went straight from high school to the 4 year schools, so the academic environment may not be as intensive and maybe that is where the stereotype started). If you want a certificate or AA to get out in the workforce, or you want to build credits to go to a 4 year school more cheaply then it is the way to go.
Community college is what you make of it. It can be a relatively inexpensive way to get an education, a stepping stone to a formal university or higher degree, or a place to slack off.
If you’re local at technical or vocational education it can be a great thing.
Of course, research the school a bit and be careful about for-profit schools where your tuition receipt is your degree.
I don’t think any less of people who have been to CC. Then again, I tend to judge people by what they actually do, not by what pieces of paper they have hanging on their wall.
I earned an Associates degree at a community college in the 1980s while I was in the military. The credit hours were much cheaper there. Later I went to a state university and all my hours from the community college were accepted. So I only had to take about 65 hours at the university to get my BS degree.
Fast forward a few years and I was teaching night classes at the same community college! I taught computer classes, mostly database, and my students were working towards an Associates degree. Many were also applying the knowledge gained the next day at their jobs. They were creating databases and I spent a lot of time helping them.
Community colleges can be a great way to earn skills and start towards a degree. If you are working full time, most community colleges, and some universities, have night and weekend courses. Not everyone can get out of high school and go directly to a 4-year college.
It took some time for our local community colleges to get their academic curricula synched up with the state university system. But now that they have, the quality is competitive (and the credits transfer.)
As far as the voactional programs go, there’s not a single for-profit college around here with any program that’s as good as any vocational program the CC’s offer.