> Honestly, California is the only state where I'd unabashedly recommend this path though. The community colleges are consistently good, you have multiple choices in terms of top tier public universities, and transfer students are given priority.

The are curriculum-design rules at the 4-year state schools in CA to smooth the transition too, which I think is fairly unusual. When I was working at UC Santa Cruz, my department proposed a new degree program, and an important part of the overall proposal was to show that there would be ways to fulfil the first two years of credit requirements (plus the prereqs for years 3/4) via courses commonly offered at in-state community colleges, so you could transfer in and still graduate on time. This does complicate design of certain kinds of curricula (it tends to discourage course sequences that strongly build on each other), but gives students more options.

I would so most states are setup where if you transfer from a CC to a public state school, you basically have everything transfer and can finish all your schooling in 4 years.

I'm from Maryland, and our CC system, at least for my county, is great. We even had a pretty good career center. Knew many people who where able to get internships at places like NASA or NIH though the community college.

I did my first two years of electrical engineering at CC and it was great. Pretty much all my professors in EE classes had PhD's in the field and were of comparable quality to the ones at my 4 year university. Plus, since your in a class of only like 20 kids, you get a much better relationship. Had a few help me with a getting an internship sophomore year.

I taught across the stream at NVCC an you are correct. I sent students to great schools (and had students from great schools for career changes).

Near metro populations, night classes tend to be filled with strong learners- often already degreed- and with interesting stories to tell as well.

When I lived in Minnesota about 10 yrs ago this was the case there too and as far as I am aware it still is

Little State Promo: Minnesota has one of the best collegiate systems in the US from community to top tier university in case anyone didn’t know :)

In Wisconsin you could transfer all classes from the two year schools to the 4 year schools and the pricing was definitely much better. I don't know for sure if that is still the case though. But it also had the advantage of being taught by the actual professor and not some TA.

When I transferred to a private school I was a bit older so they really gave some leeway in how they transferrey credits. I am guessing they would not have done the same for a 19 year old though

I live in WI, and this is still the case.

Historically, the community and tech college teachers were unionized, so it attracted people who wanted to make a career of teaching. They were actually better off than the adjuncts who were teaching the same courses at the university. When the state broke the public sector unions a few years ago, a lot of teachers took early retirement (five or six of my friends), and I don't know how this will affect things going forward.

This Wikipedia article doesn't really describe this aspect, but as I understand it, the Wisconsin Idea extended to a integrated approach to higher education. The technical colleges, numerous university campuses, and the University of Wisconsin Madison worked cooperatively to provide a full range of accessible and desirably higher education opportunities to Wisconsin's students -- and working adults.

There's a reason UW Madison has been and continues to be so highly regarded.

There was also a greater difference between in-state and out-of-state tuition, with higher requirements to qualify for the latter. Wisconsin was focused on educating Wisconsonites, and bettering the state thereby.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_Idea

Unfortunately, as another commenter mentioned, this lauded and effective system has come under attack by opponents of any sort of public spending and public good.

And, as Wisconsin has lost many union and other well-paying jobs, it's become harder to retain domestically educated talent.

It would be a shame if the system is destroyed. It's allowed this small, largely rural state to punch significantly above its weight.

Washington state has this property also (good CCs, transfer priority, curriculum designed for transferring). They’ve been renaming many of the CCs as colleges recently, but the same still holds.

Washington seems to have pretty good community colleges, but the best part is that Washington has a program called Running Start where your last two years of high school can be fulfilled by taking classes at a community college. This makes it possible (albeit difficult) to graduate from "high school" with two years of college credits and transfer to a university. Not doing this ranks pretty high on my list of life regrets.

I would recommend this path in Virginia, as well.

Why does the community college need to be "good"? Mostly you take classes there that have nothing to do with your major.

You also take foundation classes for your major. Compare an introductory physics lecture from MIT or Berkeley you find online to your average community college class. At community college you find people with insufficient understanding of algebra so if something like Ohms Law comes up you have them memorize all three forms. This is a problem, you can't teach for understanding.

As a student you find yourself in a situation like Feynman in Brazil. You sit in class and have to teach yourself the material again properly yourself.

How is that different than computer science? The only people I know that were successful at my unknown state college were people who were geeks and either already knew how to program or took an interest in it outside of class.

If you teach chemistry at community college you'll find that arrow-pushing and teaching reaction mechanisms is discouraged by faculty and resented by students because these things won't be on the test. But arrow pushing is a unifying concept that shows up everywhere; the sooner it is introduced, the better, as a chemist you really need to be familiar with the idea and its implications.

As a c.c student wishing to go further you have two problems: you need to discover the concepts that were not taught because they were "too difficult" and you need to gain familiarity with them, and that is easier with proper instruction,.

Isn't that kind of like saying core curriculum isn't important?

That's exactly what I am saying. I think we would be better off if we treated Software development like a trade that had a two year up to date curriculum that actually prepared people to be hit the ground running at a company. Yes, I'm advocating the modern equivalent of "Java Schools".

>"That's exactly what I am saying. I think we would be better off if we treated Software development like a trade that had a two year up to date curriculum that actually prepared people to be hit the ground running at a company."

So you see no reason for schools to produce people with well-rounded educations? You don't feel its important for society to have adults who have a wide-ranging perspective on things like literature, philosophy, history, art and non-computer science?

Also the OPs comment and this entire discussion is of general secondary education and not software development.

> You don't feel its important for society to have adults who have a wide-ranging perspective on things like literature, philosophy, history, art and non-computer science

If you can’t teach the necessary fundamentals of that in high school that’s a problem with you’re K-12 system.

The idea of a “well rounded education” is the result of the middle class trying to ape the leisure classes, who went to college to learn things they didn’t need to support themselves financially.

It's amusing that you view 4 years of college as excessive when your profiles states you are a lawyer. This means that you yourself spent between 7 and 8 years working on a degree.

Also your email address is as @northwestern.edu, a university that very much promotes the important of a well-rounded educational experience.

If I wanted to be a lawyer from the outset, I'd say the 8 years I spent in post-secondary school was about 5 years too long. That's not how they do it in England, for example, where law is a 3-year undergraduate major. I'm pretty critical of the fact that legal education has been taken over by academics--there is large and growing disconnect between the three years of mandatory schooling and anything you need to actually know as a lawyer. Shortening law school to one year plus a few years of apprenticeship would be vastly preferable.

My undergraduate degree is in aerospace engineering, and you do really need a 4-year degree to do that. You can't learn aeroelasticity on the job. But the traditional engineering disciplines (aero, chemical, mechanical, etc.), along with medicine and pure sciences are the exception. The vast majority of people don't need 4 years of post-secondary education, including many "professionals" (bankers, lawyers, etc.).

How is that amusing? If he wanted to be a lawyer, he didn’t have a choice. Also, who better to have the opinion that a “well rounded” education is not all it’s cracked up to be than someone who has it? I think I have more credibility to state that taking 6 courses of Calculus, Differential Equations, Linear Algebra, etc. was a waste time for co outer science as someone who has been in the industry for years than someone who has not gone to college.

>"Also, who better to have the opinion that a “well rounded” education is not all it’s cracked up to be"

Which is a very different statement than saying pursing a well-rounded educational experience is nothing more than "trying to ape the leisure classes."

There's an argument to be made that "liberal arts education" and "trade education" should be separate degrees, and that force-mating them makes both worse.

In college I took:

  * 1 literature class (shakespeare elective)
  * 0 philosophy classes
  * 1 history class (history 101)
  * 0 art classes
  * 2 science classes (physics 1 & 2)

I don't believe these gave me a wide-ranging perspective on these topics. I think my experience is pretty typical for technical majors.

The idea that most students develop this sort of thing in college is pretty clearly a myth.

I majored in electrical engineering at a good school, and had to take ~8 humanities and social science credits, so that is surprising to me.

I went to CMU and majored in ECE (minor in CS). In addition to the above I took a humanities concentration in economics which was 3 classes so that's 5 humanities classes total. I think? I graduated in 2000 so I might be forgetting something, but I don't think so.

Did you actually believe at some point that taking 0 philosophy and 0 art classes would give you a wide-ranging perspective on those topics?

>"The idea that most students develop this sort of thing in college is pretty clearly a myth."

So based on your own anecdotal experience core curriculum contributing to a well-rounded education is a "myth."

Also the idea isn't that you immediately "develop this sort of thing in college." It's to provide a foundation for thinking about things for the rest of your life.

Isn't that what they are doing in high school?

And it's not just about software development, most college curriculumns could be more focused into a two year degree.

>"Isn't that what they are doing in high school?"

To some degree yes but a much more limited scope than what's available at the university level. I don't think most public high schools teach humanities, political science etc.

Two year schools are basically vocational schools. I don't doubt there is a place for that but I think they are different products.

Unfortunately, having a two year degree with experience still gets your resume thrown in the trash at the first step of the funnel. Ask me how I know. Doesn’t make sense fir most jobs but there it is.

If I'm required to take a class outside my major I'd rather it be good (& cheap), no?

All the CCs in my area have direct transfer agreements with their state universities and some private colleges.

For state uni's they have a two year plan where all the credits transfer and you start as a junior.

A lot of the out-of-state uni's also list courses on their websites that will directly transfer so you can check if you're planning to attend later.

Every community college system will seek to make their credits as transferable as possible, it makes the schools vastly more attractive.

The 4 year places generally impose limits on how many credits they will recognize from a transfer, for the obvious reasons, they want their cut and they don't want to be a rubber stamp for some other program.

I found out that limit is not very stringent if you are older with a good GPA, the admissions person will play fast and loose with the definitions and just to get you enrolled.

It also helps to be in a state that values their junior colleges. In Virgina the community college systems have a standardized set of classes, and deals with mant state universities where virtually all the credits transfer over. I only had one class I had to take over again, and looking back the version taught at my junior college really was quite different.