According to the American Association of Community Colleges, the average community college student is 29 years old.
Community Colleges have their place. They’re a good way to save some money while knocking out your core prerequisites before transferring to a 4-year university, and many also have good vocational programs. My wife is a professor at a local CC (where she teaches college algebra) and they have a reputation for having a really strong nursing program, for example.
They get a bad rap because they also tend to be a place to just sort of warehouse kids who don’t really want to go to college, who would rather hang out by the student union playing hacky-sack or ultimate frisbee than learn anything.
In my wife’s experience, her students can generally be divided into two categories. One group are older folks returning to school later in life, and these tend to do well in her classes. The other group are the kids who were terrible students in high school and these tend to do very poorly (as in having to repeat the class 4 or 5 times). She doesn’t get many kids using CC as a stepping stone to university, but that admittedly may be due to selection bias - her classes are relatively low-level, and those types of students often can skip to higher classes.
I spent 3.5 years in community college, farting around until I figured out what I wanted to do. Got to take classes in sign language, history, science, all at $10 a unit. Some of the best teachers I ever had were at CC. My biology teacher was the best, really influenced my future course of study.
I went on to get a BS and a PhD. I don’t regret going to a CC in the slightest. It would have cost me 20X what I paid to mess around figuring out what I wanted to do if I was at a regular University.
What school would this be? I worked for years as an adjunct at a great community college as well as at a few other schools, and now I teach English full-time at a university, and I don’t see much difference in basic skills. I teach English Composition, and at least half of my students can’t write a complete sentence or use basic punctuation, and their vocabularies are abysmal. I also recently attended grad school (as the oldest student in the class) at a very well-ranked small college, and the writing/critical thinking skills of most of the students there weren’t much better. I also have a friend who teaches there who can’t believe how poorly her students write.
I’ve probably taught 30 composition classes at a community college, and the skill level of the students there was no better or worse than anywhere else I taught.
Depends on the community college. Some of them are great, and take undergraduate education far more seriously than most four-year schools. Some are overcrowded and overwork faculty to the point where they have little time or energy to spend on individual students. Most, I’d venture to say, attract a higher proportion of students who lack either the academic ability or the commitment to succeed at a more selective college, and in that respect they probably do provide a weaker educational experience – both because college students learn a lot from their peers, and because faculty may be forced to water down course content so that the weaker students can pass. (This is a persistent problem at my local CC; at the four-year university where I teach, students start writing essays from Day 1 of English 101, and by the end of the semester, they’ve finished a longer, documented research paper. At the CC, they spend most of the semester writing paragraphs, and in most cases learn nothing about research and documenting sources. It’s not a comparable experience, and some of the CC transfer students land in major trouble when they transfer to the university and find out the hard way about plagiarism.)
That said, we also have some fantastic students transferring here from various CCs, so I’ve learned not to generalize. (Here in Mississippi, community college is essentially free for local students, and it’s much more comparable to a four-year school – many of the CCs have dorms and football. So a lot of very good students start off there, and in fact transferring from a CC is the norm rather than the exception. There doesn’t seem to be the same stigma to attending a two-year, open-admissions school that there is in other parts of the country. I’m in two minds about this, because I do think many of the stronger transfer students would have been better off if they had been in a more challenging and competitive environment from the start, and some of the weaker ones should have been weeded out much earlier, but it does make college much more accessible.)
Community colleges are fine at what they do. It’s just that what a community college does is different from (and yes, in some sense less than) what a four-year college does.
Nothing wrong with the school except the students. (Ditto, there’s little that’s unusually right with prestigious colleges except the students.)
Hi, I’m a community college professor. I enjoy teaching at this level because I have small classes in which I can interact with my students more deeply, be more aware of whether or not they are grasping the material, and work with them to make the material relevant to their lives. I teach my classes the same way I taught when I was a TA in grad school at a traditional four-year institution, and I’m pretty much required to, since most of our courses are designed to be accepted as transfer courses to four-year institutions, and therefore have to fit certain levels of academic integrity.
Yes, our system does offer a large number of remedial courses for students, but so do four-year institutions. Thirty percent of all high school graduates in this state require remedial English or math or both when they go to college, and that jumps to 60 percent at the community college. Many of our students come to the community college system because they know they need those remedial courses and would rather take them in a small class setting for less money before they transfer.
My classes contain a mix of traditional and non-traditional students, especially the class I teach that is a requirement for the nursing program. The traditional students aren’t any different than the ones I TA’d for in grad school, and the non-traditional students work their asses off and are totally motivated to succeed.
My school has a number of programs designed to assist at-risk students (first-generation students, single mothers, etc.) in being successful and continuing in their education. I have a number of students who say that they never considered college until they start working with those programs.
We offer large numbers of online classes, which allows students who have young children or elderly parents or who are in far-off places to continue their education. I’ve had students in my classes who are stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan. I like the fact that I can bring education to people who might normally be locked out of that opportunity.
There are definitely courses on campus that are known to be cake courses, but that was true for me as well as an undergraduate, and I went to Harvard.
Overall, I like the idea that community colleges bring educational opportunities to a wider variety of students and students who are non-traditional than a traditional four-year institution. And many of us, myself included, came to teaching after having years of experience in our respective fields, so we bring both academic content and real-world applications to our classes. About half of my colleagues have PhDs, some of them are published authors and/or considered experts in their respective fields, and have won state and national awards in their disciplines.
Any college can be 13th grade for any given student, depending on the combination of student and instructors and motivation and other factors. I don’t think community college students are any more likely to piss away their college years getting wasted and playing hacky-sack than four-year students.
With the cost of 4 year colleges, Comm. Colleges make a lot of sense. Before you enroll you can find out exactly which classes will transfer . You can save a lot of money and find out if college is the proper choice for you. A good Comm. College will be as challenging as a 4 year with less distractions.
Wealthy will look down on them because they can afford to give their kids the best. There is no prestige in graduating from Henry Ford Community College, but local employers know how good it is.
Maybe “responsible” wasn’t the right word. “Irresponsible for themselves”, perhaps? I mentioned debt, too-often incurred without understanding what it means, but there’s also the model whose laundry is done by Mom, yet he claims to be living on his own. See the recent thread about “non-traditional students”: the immense majority of Americans don’t follow the mold of “graduate HS at 18, go straight to a 4y school, graduate in 4y”, but that mold is the one considered “traditional” despite not following any tradition that’s actually ever existed. It’s not necessarily what the majority of families expect for their children, but it’s part of the national mythos, a piece of the American dream.
For attitudes about people staying at home, see several dozen threads in these same boards. People get yelled at for staying at home to take over the family farm…
and the concept of “the college experience”, whether one expects the students in a 4y college to do their own laundry or leave their underwear all over the floor, is again a specific part of American (and, IIUC, Canadian) culture. In most other countries, people go to university to study, not to “have an experience”.
I mostly agree w/ Frylock. There’s nothing wrong with them in principle. It’s a great way to get some basic courses out of the way for usually a lot less money. Make sure you you take classes that will transfer. Even if they’re in the same university system, not all classes will transfer.
As far as professors more interested in teaching; that may be true. However they’re also used to teaching to a class of student where at least some of the students couldn’t get into a 4 year university for whatever reason (or are dropping down to CC to improve their GPA). IOW there are a lot more dead beats in CC. This can be a good or a bad thing. My daughter is in a group project at a local CC. She has some deadbeats in her group. She does most of the work. The group grade was a C on a recent project, and her individual grade was a B. The professor said he knew that she did most of the work, but couldn’t give a personal grade more than one grade higher than the group grade.
I don’t agree with that in theory, because in my mind if it truly IS an individual grade, then you grade on that person individually… NOT individually plus considering how the group did.
Well, in the (apparently worthless) composition courses I teach, I have a good mix of older and younger students. I’ve literally had an 18 year old fresh from high school in the same class with a 35 year old Iraq vet. But I would say the majority of them fall in their mid to late twenties. Some of them are very dedicated, get their work done, attend every class meeting, and some of them disappear after the fourth week and I never see or hear from them again. I’ve taught at the University of Utah, the CC, and a local career college, and I’d say my current job is more comparable to the University in terms of student make-up and behavior. The career college job was interesting b/c many of the students were far below the standards expected at the community college.
ETA: Though there are a lot of deadbeats. At least 1/3 of my students in any given course will slack off and disappear. Of the remaining students, maybe another 1/3 won’t worry about turning in their work at all. But then I catch glimpses of their lives and realize that their situations are far more difficult than what most university students have to deal with. Not all of them are trying to pull themselves out of a shitty life, but a good number of them are, especially now with the economy the way it is.
CCs are great for people needing a two year terminal degree, like in nursing. They are good for people who cannot afford a four year college, or whose parents feel they need a test before being sent away. But I’ve seen lots of problems.
In California, CCs are still pretty cheap. That reduces the drive of some people to stick it out. We know people who sent their son to a CC (theoretically) only to be able to keep him on their health insurance. My wife took a writing class at one which began with an equal number of kids and older students. The kids had vanished by halfway through the term.
My daughter took a statistics class in a CC while in high school, and found it deadening - not the material, but the from the dullness of the students. My son-in-law, who was a mess in high school started out in one, and it did nothing for him. He finally pulled himself together, but no thanks to the CC. And around here the CCs have plenty of teachers with heavy accents also.
I think a CC has more distractions. You are at home, you still have your same network of friends, and you don’t live school. In the dorm I lived in, at least, everyone else being busy doing problem sets was good motivation to do mine. Plus, especially freshman year, you had a network of people doing the same classes right near you, so you could get some help with stuff hard for you and give some help for stuff you get.
Or you could get distracted by the kegger down the hall, or the cute chick next door. Or the ultimate frisbee competition on the quad. Or the hackysack-and-bong circle in front of the dorm.
It seems to me that people want to forget that traditional four-year-institutions have slacker students (many of whom end up in MY classes after they get thrown out of said four-year institution for failing too many classes), party atmospheres, deadly-dull or easy courses, deadly-dull or braindead or ditzy students, in an effort to continue to paint community colleges as Loserville for Losers, and a waste of time and resources.
There are losers, and winners, in both settings. There are benefits and disadvantages, for a variety of students, at both settings. And the research in Colorado shows that students who start out at 2-year community colleges and then transfer to four-year institutions are significantly more likely to complete a four-year degree than students who begin at four-year institutions.
Don’t knock experience. Both my kids got at least as much out of the environment as out of classes, from working with a world famous professor to being captain or a riding team to getting to intern with a state legislator.
I used to be very impressed by European universities, but my daughter did a year in Germany, and found it very easy. She is now in grad school there in the spare time she has from teaching (37 Euros this semester 
) and is not intimidated in the least.
School is a lot more than the classroom, and there is lots of good stuff just not available to CC students. Not to say it isn’t the right thing for some, but it isn’t the same as a good four year school.
Well, I sent my kid to the school that is at the very bottom of any list of party schools.
I totally buy this - but remember those students are the self-selected set that both did well enough in a CC to transfer and had enough drive to go through the process.
And that negates the rest of my statement how? Because your kid didn’t go to a party school, there are no party schools? Or did you have another point to make?
True, and that, once again, negates the value of a community college how? If approximately one in four college freshmen drop out (that rate varies based on the year and the poll) and approximately 54% of beginning four-year college students don’t have a degree six years later (and that number is higher for non-white students), why isn’t that information held against four-year institutions?
I thought of one other drawback. Although I was lucky enough to live near an excellent CC, it didn’t prepare me academically for those 300 & 400-level classes you start taking in your major junior year. I would say that competition-wise, my CC was actually easier than my high school, and I was in a fairly competitive major at my university, where most kids are going on to graduate school.
Just to echo what others have said: The only thing “wrong” with community colleges is that, by their very nature, they’re going to draw less-than-motivated people. I only took one class at a CC (at an institution derided as “12 Mile High” – it was on 12 Mile Road), but the teacher was a perfectly capable instructor who left me with a fairly good understanding of macroeconomics. The students in that class were a mix of class clowns recently graduated from high school, people like me who were squeezing in some credits while on summer break from a 4-year school, and then older adults, including several women who were ready to get back into the workforce after raising their kids.
But, honestly, unless you simply do not have the means or ability to move away from home, I would almost always recommend a traditional 4-year program to a properly motivated student. While the classes at community college are on par with those at 4-year schools, the extracurricular activities are nowhere near as good. The best part of my college experience was working for a full-blown daily campus newspaper. A community college can’t offer that. It also can’t offer the multitude of clubs, activities, varsity and intramural athletics and other things that are part and parcel of a 4-year school.
Plus, there’s the stuff you can’t as easily quantify – the experience of living away from home, in a dorm (or just off campus) and navigating the college social scene is more than just an excuse to party and get drunk. It also makes you do some growing up (some of it the hard way). I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world.