Anytime I hear of community colleges, it’s disparagingly. The sitcom Community uses the setting of a community college as a joke. What’s wrong with them, if anything? Why did they get a bad repuation (if they do indeed have a bad reputation)? Is it just a few bad apples that gave them a bad name?
Well, first of all you typically receive a 2 year associates degree instead of a 4 year bachelors degree. So right there you are receiving less education.
Because they typically offer more technical degrees or are a way station for students who could not get accepted to a 4 year program, they are typically viewed as more “vocational” and less academically prestigeous.
I’m sure this will degenerate into another “college is an overpriced waste of time for elitist jerks” discussion.
There’s nothing wrong with them at all in principle. In fact, I think it’s a great idea to go to a CC for some basic courses first, and transfer them to a University a year or two down the road. Much cheaper that way. And the quality of education at CCs can be just as good for courses like that.
Professors at CCs are often more interested in teaching than professors at research institutions, anyway. So things can be better at CCs, when it comes to the basic core courses.
Have a huge heap of salt to grind on it, but I have the WAG that it’s partly related to the American view that college is “the time when you leave home and when you start being responsible for your expenses (and your first huge chunk of debt)” and one of the reasons to go to a CC is “being able to go there from home, saving the expense and stress of moving out”.
What does this expression mean?
It’s an extreme version of “Take this with a grain of salt”
Ah, thanks. I was wondering whether it was that, an extreme version of axe grinding or a Spanish expression.
When I was in high school, the local community college was referred to as 13th grade and it was seen as the next step for people who weren’t serious about college or couldn’t hack it at a four-year school. Having worked in a community college, I can say wholeheartedly that this is actually a good thing, because there are people who need their basics reinforced before they go on to more difficult work, but that was how we saw it at the time.
From an employee’s perspective, I’m concerned that some community colleges as well as universities make it too easy for students to keep racking up credits that don’t add up to anything, while taking off debt to do it, but that’s a whole 'nother issue.
Community college professor here!
After having taught at two major research universities I took a faculty position at a cc and have never been more professionally fulfilled; in my experience, students receive a far better general education because teaching is the central focus of the institution and classes are not taugt by graduate students/TAs. While I and most of my colleagues publish, go to academic conferences, and do all the things that university faculty do, our first charge is excellence in teaching.
My students are overwhelmingly traditional college age and the majority of them could have gone right into a four-year program, but decided to start with us.
More than 47% of all college students start their degree at a community college. I think the outlook on CCs as a dumping ground for “lesser-than” students is in for a sea-change in our culture. It’s also worth noting that in my department 46 of the 60 full-time faculty have doctorates and all of us came from either level-I research institutions/Ivy league graduate programs (our last two hires were from Princeton and Oxford).
I’m slightly skeptical regarding this point. I’m sure the faculty at most CCs are perfectly fine and dedicated teachers - but you don’t do all of your learning from the faculty, even in introductory-level courses. One of the great things about college is learning to bounce ideas off of and argue with your fellow students - and that’s going to be a much more challenging and useful experience if you’re at a school where everyone already has the academic basics down pat.
When I was attending a state college, I took an entry-level computer engineering course where our in-class assignments would be things like “Here’s a sheet of paper and a pen, write a program to implement <obscure mathematical function> that compiles and runs correctly on the first try.” I think I got a C in that class.
Years later my employer sent me to an entry-level java programming class at a community college, where our assignments were things like, “Here’s a simple little program that adds 2 numbers, type it in character by character.”
After you’ve struggle through a real course, no matter how pointless, it’s natural to feel snobbish towards those who take the “easier” route. Standard Disclaimer Through the wisdom of experience I’ve learned that the 4-year course was mostly useless for your average developer whereas the CC course would definitely land you a comfortable career as a programmer, and those who continue to feel snobbish are probably just trying to justify why they spent a lot more time and money to get the same job as the guy with an associates. Nevertheless, I understand the sentiment.
Calculus is calculus and Composition 101 is Composition 101 and on and on. I went to a well-known 4 year university - my Calc class was taught in an auditorium with 200+ students. My husband went to a CC and his Calc class was 14. Guess who’s better at calculus? I had far too many classes taught by TAs, often TAs with thick accents who yelled to make themselves understood.
If I knew then what I know now, I might have taken a different route.
And a great many people go on to a four year college.
My daughter went to community college, got an AA degree, and transferred her credits to a four year college, where she attended classes for another couple of years, and graduated cum laude.
So yeah, a community college WILL give a lesser degree. But no student has to stop there. I think a community college is an excellent place to get the core requirements met, and then the student can go on to a four year college. And the savings are considerable.
There’s a current GQ thread that, for a little while, almost got hijacked into an argument over whether community college faculty have the title “Professor” and whether they have Ph.D.s. Your experience (and Cisco’s in that thread) is so different from mine (and Lance Turbo’s) that I wonder whether we’re even talking about the same kind of institution.
In my neck of the woods, a community college offers a mix of traditional academic and vocational/occupational/technical classes, serves both traditional (recent HS grad) and non-traditional students, has an open admissions policy (anyone with a HS diploma or GED gets accepted), and offers many developmental-level classes for weaker or less-prepared students (literally dozens of sections of “Developmental Arithmetic I,” “Developmental Arithmetic II & Prealgebra,” “Developmental Beginning Algebra I,” etc., as compared to three or four sections of Calculus I). Instructors typically do not have doctorates—how would a Ph.D. in math help you to teach developmental arithmetic?
That’s exactly what I did. My community college had a deal with a state university that if you get your AA there, the university accepts that for all Gen Eds. I did it that way, got a BA at the university, and saved thousands of dollars in the process.
I did the same thing. The university I eventually graduated from didn’t accept all the credits from the CC, but they provided a list of the credits that would transfer, and I only picked from those classes. Interestingly, I didn’t end up with an AA due to that system, but it didn’t matter because transferring the credits was key for me. I thought it was a great experience, although I will say that you do lose out on a lot of the 4-year college experience, which I regret a bit. I wasn’t ready to go away to school, so I did what was best for me at the time, but I can’t say I didn’t miss out.
Depending on what you’re wanting to study, there is nothing wrong with them. Generally smaller classes and a lot less money than a 4-year college. The one I went to was a lot like high school for adults. On a resume 2 years of community college is a lot better than just high school, but of course not as good as a 4-year college. YMMV.
I don`t think this is even remotely the American view. People have come to expect college to be a second adolescence where 20 and 21 year old adults can’t be expected to take care of themselves because they’re still in school.
Even the minority of people who do think young people should be responsible for themselves usually just yell about it and wave their hands around. I’d say it’s the minority of the minority in America that have actual expectations that high school graduates should be on their own and responsible for their own expenses.
Even those people would recognize that those kids staying at home saving money could be contributing to the household some way or another and generally being responsible young adults.
It isn’t generally true though that calculus is calculus. It may be nice to have a smaller class, but not if the class is structured to move slower and be less rigorous than the equivalent course at a university. Did you or your husband study a field like engineering where calculus is a foundation for much more complicated math and quantitative courses, or was it just a requirement?
I encouraged my brother to take two required composition courses at a community college because in my experience, even though he’ll be doing a lot of writing throughout his degree, the composition courses are a waste of time and not helpful to be a better writer.
I’d never encourage him or anyone else though to take a foundation course like calculus at a community college that’s not set up to teach engineers or scientists. It’s just not a good preparation for future course work.
I think community colleges are fine. One thing I’ve found about them for sure, is the students often tend to be older and more serious.
I’d say the exact opposite, the main reason being that CC is predominately 2 year programs, so you end up with a student body that is predominately 17-19, with only a few older/serious individuals. A university on the other hand will have the same number of people in first/second year (the 17-19s) but then also have 3rd and 4rth year, as well as grad and post grad students.
Which is fine. I’ve been to both community college, university, and graduate school, and in the end there is nothing wrong with community college. And I’d much rather send my children to 2 years of CC before university. My wife on the other hand (having been through only university and grad school) forbids it. I guess it’s good we don’t have children.