Similarly, there were many professors who did not care at all. However, my girlfriend is currently attending the Ohio State University as a medical student, and similarly many professors either (a) do not care about their students or whether they are effectively teaching them material, or (b) have too many students and are unable to effectively teach them all.
While I attended some classes at the community college that had 150+ students (less than her largest classes, to be fair), those professors actually were some of the best I had. Maybe I just got lucky.
FWIW, she also attended Eastern Michigan University and Washtenaw Community College (with me) prior to this. The community college was her favorite.
In any case, there are plenty of skills I'd like to learn, or learn more about (e.g. mechanical skills, art skills, etc.) and without a doubt I would choose a community college -- and research my professors! -- over a university. In either case, you should pick your professors carefully; but the price difference (even on a software engineer's salary) is simply not worth going to a university IMO.
Don't forget that money spent at the beginning of your career is worth more than money spent at the end! (Assuming you're investing well.) Compounding interest and all.
Given how little it pays to teach in a community college, I'm surprised there is any teacher who didn't care.
They genuinely liked to teach and loved it when they could get their students to care about a subject as much as they did themselves. You could tell they did it out of passion, and moreover, for the students.
Everyone has an anecdote.
The problem for me is that (like many people who didn't go to college the first time around) I didn't do particularly well in high school. And from what I've seen, the schools that won't hold my grades from 20 years ago against me are not better than the aforementioned community colleges.
Right now I'm doing a self-paced online thing... it's not better than a community college, but we will see how it turns out.
The professors were underpaid and many of them didn't care -- some did care and were excellent teachers, but a lot of them were bitter about their career outcomes and just went through the motions. My best professors were the ones who had careers outside of the community college and taught part time, including a tenured professor at Stanford and a professional archeologist.
Honestly it's hard for me to recommend community college to people who are driven and dedicated to their educations, because so many of the other people in those institutions are not like that.
If I could go back in time I would gladly borrow an extra $20k to go to a university from the beginning. Over the time scale of a lifetime, or even just a decade, that's not a lot of money.