What is this board's opinion of community college?

In California, for the last 20 years or so (or maybe more?) there’s been an organized plan for transferring from a public CC to a four-year state college or university. I forget what it’s called. But basically, there’s a list of lower-division general ed classes you can take at your college, and if you take the required number of courses from Column A and Column B and Column C, etc., then you will be guaranteed that the entire collection of classes you take will be transferable to ANY state-run four-year college, for complete satisfaction of your entire lower-division general ed requirements.

I’ve put some thought into this, and what I’ve come up with is that community colleges are less disruptive than a four year university.

This can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on the situation. I’ve seen it work beautifully for some. It can be affordable, close to home, and a good stepping stone. I think it works best for older students, students with kids, or others who are in a situation where the minimal disruption is really beneficial. I’ve also seen it work fairly well for younger student who are mature, have a good family life, and just want to lay low for a couple years while they get their gen eds out of the way. You miss out on some of the social and extracurricular aspects of a four year, but the classes themselves can be quite good.

I’ve also seen it work out terribly. I’ve seen people drag out community college year after year, adding and dropping classes, and never getting anywhere. When you are working, even with a low income and limited prospects, it requires a lot of discipline to favor your classes over paid work and the fun that comes with spending your money. When school is such a low investment, it can be very easy to drop a class, put it off another semester, and worry about it later. I’ve seen A LOT of bright, motivated people fall into that trap and lose sight of their dreams.

Some people need that disruption- getting away from their family (families are not always a positive educational influence), getting away from their old peer group, forgetting about their upcoming promotion to assistant manager at McDonalds, and getting 100% invested in what they are doing. Some people need to really feel the investment they are making to take it seriously.

Others, of course, would conk out either way, and if you are going to drop out it’s better to do so in community college.

But it’s well documented that “undershooting” your university- going to one less selective than you could get into- is associated with a higher drop out rate. This is especially true among first generation college students, who have families, friends, and partners who are likely to be pulling them from school. In those cases, it’s often better to be fully immersed in people who value education and take it as a given.

(And I don’t mean to imply that community college students are less likely to value their education…but that community college students have more outside, non-college influences.)

You’ll probably be surrounded by a few more fuckups, people who don’t belong in college, people who don’t care about getting an education, etc. in CC, so you’re going to have to provide more motivation from you than from your friends there. The competition, IOW, is you–you’re going to have to push yourself to excel, because the standards for most of the CC’s students is pretty low. That said, you can get yourself into a good school, and get a good BA, as **Wendell Wagner **and some others have said. I think I’ve told about my first girlfriend who went to CC (CCCC, in fact–Cape Cod Community College), got a 4.0 there, got into an Ivy League college, got a 4.0 there, and went to medical school.

This is important to note. For every physician, dentist, pharmacist, engineer, and MBA there needs to be several people with technical certifications.

It depends on the person. In NJ we hired lots of programmers who got AA degrees. We screened the hell out of them, but the ones we got were very good. Some went on to get bachelor’s and masters degrees.

In California as mentioned there is a clear path from a CC to a CSU or even UC. But not everyone makes it, and the CCs are relatively inexpensive, and are sometimes full of people who don’t give a crap. We knew someone enrolled just to stay on his parents’ health insurance, and who never actually attended any classes. My daughter took a few classes in high school, and she was struck by how many college age students didn’t give a crap. There were older students also, and they were a lot more mature. My wife took a CC writing class - none of the college age kids ever showed up.
I think there is a real benefit to leaving home for college, which you don’t get in a CC. While you can goof off in a more expensive college also, if you have ambition you have a lot more opportunities there. But if you just can’t afford all four years, or want to do something for which an AA is the ticket, and are willing to work even if your fellows don’t, it is a good deal.

This is exactly what my younger daughter did, and she’s now happily ensconsed at UC Davis. When she graduates, all her diploma will say is that she graduated from Davis, and she’ll have done if for a helluva lot less money than her peers that went there for four years.

Oh, I’d nearly forgotten about those classes. I went to a four year college, and the 100 level courses had hundreds of students in each class, were generally taught by non-professors, and had just about NO interaction. Basically, I think that the students would have been just as well off by watching a recorded show in most cases. I did have one 101 class that was good, and the teacher was actually a professor who tried her best to interact with her students, but she was generally regarded as an oddball. Naturally, I loved her. We swapped books back and forth.

I’m guessing that the US equivalent of community colleges here in Australia are what we call TAFE colleges (Technical and Further Education). That’s where we offer non-degree courses, sometimes in the trades (see bakers, plumbers and sparkies) when most training is done at the workplace but a certain number of school hours are required to complete the apprenticeship.

But other courses are offered as well, including Welfare Studies diplomas, Child-Care, Aged or Attendant Care, (non-mainstream) Nursing, Business Studies, Tourism and Creative Writing etc etc etc.

I have attended both sorts…an internationally regarded university (Melbourne Uni to be precise…three yrs for degree, four yrs for honours, another year or two for masters and PhD depending on the course) and a TAFE college. And whilst the expected academic ‘rigour’ is higher at the universities here, the actual ‘workload’ at the TAFE colleges was more than double that of the uni in the early years.

When I was last a student (12 yrs ago) the university required that I complete 2 1500/2000 word essays per semester for assessment (four per academic year) and a bog-easy exam. In contrast, at a TAFE college, there were weekly assignments, two individual research projects, two group research projects PLUS examinations at the end of the semester. :eek:

I came out of uni knowing how to use a library and to structure an essay…which is great if your future employment requires you to hang out in libraries and write academic essays. :smiley:

But knowing what I know now, if I were an employer and looking to hire someone, I’d go for the TAFE (or Community College) graduate. They’ve (IMHO) got a better all-round grasp of the area of their study, more grounded, and don’t have their head stuck up their arses.

:stuck_out_tongue:

When I first got to the US to go to graduate school, I was shocked to discover how many of the professors loathed teaching. I understand that you’re more likely to have a teacher who actually wanted to teach in a CC; if I’d stayed there and had kids I would have made sure that we looked into the local CC.

My sister in law is already planning the college studies of her 7yo and 4yo; for some reason I can’t comprehend, she expects them to study the same major she did (the eldest is as suited for it as an iron nail to being on a submarine’s outer hull). I’ve reminded The Proud Daddy (my brother) of our friends whose parents wanted to design their whole life path and of our many relatives who chose not to go to college (some went to trade school, some went for on-the-job learning) and have done fine.

After getting 2 graduate degrees, I had to go back to school when I changed careers. In the interim I even taught at one for a semester. After I was established in my 3rd and last career I again went back to school, again at community college, for “fun” to learn calculus, digital electronics and various other subjects. So I’m fairly well acquainted with at least the one college where I taught and the two where I was a student.

The bottom line is that it really depends on the CC. The best ones will have established credit transfer agreements with nearby accredited 4yr colleges. If they don’t, and you’re eventual objective is a 4yr degree, there’s a good chance that you’re wasting you’re money. Mine did and I think that the acceptance rate for credits from their associate’s degree was somewhere around 80 or 90% - which may even be on the low side. This was for transfers to a well regarded state university.

The problem I’ve noticed with CC’s is that most of the instructors are part time and paid virtually nothing. I don’t remember my “salary” for a semester but I’m reasonably sure I would have made more at McDonalds. So the people who teach there as a general rule, at least hopefully, aren’t there for the money.

This also means that they most likely have real jobs in the real world which may well impact their class schedules, how frequently they test, how much material they cover and how quickly, etc., not to mention the quality of their instruction in any given week. Every dept will also have full time professors, but my recollection is that they were very much in the minority.

The up side however is that the people teaching are most likely working in the field that they’re teaching. As a result they can breath life into even the dullest of subjects - if they choose to and have the ability. But even if not, they are at least likely to be current with the state of the art and familiar with intricacies and nuances that someone who simply teaches for a living may not be. That can be invaluable if the subject happens to be in your area of concentration.

Over all, despite the potential pitfalls, I have to say that most of the teachers I had were at least good and many were stellar. I think I can count on one hand the number who were awful and even then I would have to use the term sparingly compared to professors I had in college. As an undergrad, more often than not you went into a class, especially 100 and 200 level classes just assuming that they were going to be “self taught” as we used to say. I don’t think I would be prepared to say that about any of the CC classes I’ve ever taken.

That isn’t really the equivalent; we make a fairly hard distinction between trade schools and community colleges. In particular, community colleges are accredited by the same bodies which accredit regular colleges and universities, allowing many people to use the CC as a stepping-stone to a four-year degree. (Some CC’s do offer some non-degree vocational classes as well. But schools which only offer vocational subjects are not part of the regular college system in the US.)

The local county community college offers classes for credit and classes for non credit. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a catalog, but I know that they used to offer classes in dog training, various athletic classes, and various arts and crafts classes. But if a class is offered for credit, just about all the credits will transfer to at least the local four year colleges.

It appears to me that the purposes of TAFE institutions in Australia sort of overlap with the purposes of community colleges in the U.S.:

Community colleges in the U.S. offer courses that can be transferred to regular bachelor’s-degree-granting institutions. It appears that TAFE institutions do a little of this. Community colleges offer associate degree programs, which are two-year programs in subjects that don’t require bachelor’s degrees. These are vaguely “technical” or “vocational” subjects. It appears that TAFE institutions do this too. Community colleges often offer non-credit courses, which are what’s usually referred to as adult education courses. I don’t know if TAFE institutions do this also. It appears that TAFE institutions also offer courses to allow high school dropouts the chance to finish high school. Some community colleges might do this, but I don’t think it’s typical. Some community colleges in the U.S. offer courses just for particular business firms, who pay the college to set up the course and teach it on their campus. I don’t know if TAFE institutions do this. I think that both community colleges and TAFE institutions are big messes, offering lots of courses with lots of varied purposes.

You are sort of comparing apples and oranges here. The Ivy League are largely considered among the top 4 year undergrad and graduate schools in the country, if not the world. As others pointed out, a CC offers a 2 year Associates degree. So you typically would not have a CC grad competing against a Harvard MBA for the same position.

Gainesville has an excellent university and also an excellent community college (which actually just started offering 4 year degrees so they’re a regular college now ). If I could do it over, I would have gotten my AA from the latter and transferred to the former. Nobody gives a crap where you earned your first 60 credits once you have your bachelor’s, and I would have saved a ton of money.

msmith537, while it’s true that there are no jobs where somebody will be deciding whether to hire a Harvard M.B.A. or someone with an associate’s degree from a community college, there will occasionally be (as I said in my first post) cases where someone will be deciding between hiring someone who did all his undergraduate work at Harvard before getting an M.B.A. at Harvard Business School and somebody who did very well at a community college, a good state university, and Harvard Business School. Basically, somebody making that kind of a hiring decision won’t even be thinking much about the person’s undergraduate education. They will be looking at their grades in business school and any business experience they have so far.

Interesting throw-away fact: Jill Biden, the wife of the Vice-President, teaches at a community college.

If you’re planning on taking your first couple of years of college at a community college and then transferring to a four-year institution to finish up, my one caveat would be to check with your intended four-year school before you start, to make sure that your credits will be transferable, and exactly which courses you need. Other than that, it’s a perfectly fine plan, and will probably save you a fair bit of money.

I teach at a four-year university that gets a lot of community college transfers, and I agree with this. Many of the students we get from local CCs are reasonably well-prepared and hard-working, and they do fine after they transfer. However, some of them are in way, way, over their heads, and have no idea HOW screwed they are because they’ve never been to a school with any meaningful academic standards before. (We have to accept the transfer credits from CCs because of our articulation agreement, but in many cases the courses aren’t really comparable; for example, English 101 at some of the community colleges involves writing paragraphs rather than essays. Also, the CC instructors around here are ridiculously overworked and underpaid – teaching seven courses a semester, in some cases – so they tend to cut corners wherever they can, as a matter of sheer survival. This is the flip side of the “large lecture course with 300 students” problem that you might get at a big research university – being at a CC doesn’t guarantee optimal conditions for teaching and learning, any more than being at a four-year school does.) Anyway, a fair number of transfers end up crashing and burning at the university. They may have done this if they had started here as freshmen, too, but at least they would have invested less time (and probably less money) before figuring out that they weren’t going to make it through a bachelor’s degree program.

I’m also not convinced that the CCs do a good job of serving the students at the other end of the bell curve. We get a few transfer students who are incredibly bright, and they do very well here, but I can’t help thinking that they really should have been in our residential honors program from the start. They could have had two years of scholarship money and a close-knit group of super-smart peers who would challenge them and a month taking summer classes in Europe, but for whatever reason they just didn’t apply. (This is a common problem with smart students from poor backgrounds – they don’t REALIZE they’re competitive applicants for the honors program, or that the sticker price at our university is not going to be the actual price, so they don’t even try.)