I went to Princeton, and after graduating I spent 2 years in community college studying accounting (night school).

The coursework was rigorous and excellent.

Yes - there's unfortunately some notion that as you move lower down the "prestige ladder", the easier / less rigorous the academic content becomes.

I've studied at both good and "poor" schools, and my experience has been that both have their strengths and weaknesses. I've taken classes that were extremely rigorous and in-depth at the low-prestige (or rather, no-prestige) school, pretty much identical to the same classes offered at the big-name school. Only difference was that the first school had a 50% failure rate, whereas the latter school had much better pass-rate, along with grade distribution that was shifted more towards the A.

This is probably due to the caliber of students, the work was the same.

Were these computer science classes? My experience is that the difference between top and “poor” schools is much wider in CS (likely because the academic job market in the humanities and sciences is so tough that you get highly qualified teachers even at “poor” schools).

Electrical Engineering

But with that said, there's a ton of variance within school themselves. Courses can be different from year to year, depending on who's in charge.

One thing I noticed was that the lifers - that is, the older professors, usually had very predictable classes. They'd use the same lecture notes, hand-ins, etc. year after year, often running on decades. They knew their audience, so to speak, and had extremely structured classes. These classes tended to be quite comfortable to take...no surprises, to put it that way.

Then you had the freshly minted professors, that would have a class here and there, usually new classes every other semester. These guys tended to be much more rigorous, and assuming on the level of competence (of their audience) - at least in grad school.

During highschool, you mean.

I took classes at community college both during high school and after I graduated from college. You can learn a lot of practical skills at community college that higher education looks down on. I learned to weld at Harvard through the physics lab and didn't realize how much I sucked at it until relearning it from a community college instructor. The person who taught me at community college was far more qualified.

Coincidentally, I first learned TIG welding at Williams via the physics machine shop. One of the memorable pieces of advice from my earnest instructor (the Buildings and Grounds guy who did the necessary welding) was something like "Only weld galvanized at the end of the day because you'll feel like shit afterwards. It helps if you go home and drink lots of milk."

The wisdom of his health advice aside, he was a decent welder taught me useful techniques. But when I later took a community college TIG course from a former nuclear welder, I was astonished by the precision the instructor demonstrated. I got a lot better, not exactly because of the quality of instruction, but just from having seen what excellence looked like.

I took networking courses at a community college. The professor was fantastic, a former IBM employee who'd been doing network stuff at AT&T for 20 years. He wasn't a professor, but this guy knew his stuff. It was the perfect way to get some "hands-on" experience with routing and switching.

Community colleges don't do everything well, but when it comes to building hard skills, it's hard to think of a better bang for your buck. (Particularly if you live in NY like me, it's free!)