We do need to reduce the stigma of community colleges, they fulfill an important need.
Great as it sounds, I think the main benefit is accountability rather than better teaching. You don't want to be the guy who wastes an hour with the fellow of the academy of sciences.
As for teaching, such people tend to have more of a bird's eye view of things than is good for teaching. They don't know a whole lot about the details of the subject anymore, their job is to find funding. The best teachers tended to be recent PhDs.
He said there was no discernible difference in quality of the lectures, lecturers, content etc between the two. I'm sure it would be a very different situation if he wanted to go into research but that is a much much smaller portion of all people who go to university.
I also have a friend who went to Riverside college in Austin TX for the first 2 years before transferring to UT Austin for the last 2 years. She said that many of the lecturers from UT Austin also taught courses at Riverside college. Her years at Riverside cost her around 8k a year, her years at UT cost her something like 40-50k. She was on the GI bill so didn't have to pay for most of it anyway but still pretty amazing when you think about.
Because of continued budget cuts to the CSU/UC system which resulted in less sections being offered or having those with openings simply conflicting with my core major classes I had the misfortune of having to attend Community College alongside Uni.
I say misfortune not because the of the lack of prestige, I was a junior by that time and had already attended 3 universities due to budget/class shortages so all the luster of the University system had all been washed away a long time ago, and all I wanted was to graduate and try to cope as best I could in the financial crisis job market to pay down all my debt.
But what gave it a stigma, in my onion, were the levels infantile like behaviour everyone was expected to work under, I was shocked to see you had to ask permission to go to the bathroom, and you were penalized for attendance. Grown adults, as in over 30, were complying too. I can only suspect that the workforce had taken it's toll on them and they didn't even question it anymore.
Mind you these were general-ed classes that I honestly didn't care about but had to complete to graduate in 5 years and I was inclined not to pay full University price for them if possible so I stuck it out, but even in my lower division classes at University which were impacted we ever forced to attend class--you're an Adult its your money and it's your fault if you fail after all.
What pushed me over the edge was one day when after working all night at my job, and having a lab practical in the morning I drove 1.5 hour and arrived to the CC campus on time only to find out everyone agreed to go home to watch the World Cup matches... I lost it, and I just saw red!
I knew then I would never have gotten past the first week if I didn't have any agency after these regretful experiences if this was all I had as an option after I finished High School. It felt exactly like High School, but with the added bonus of having to pay out of pocket for it.
By contrast, I took an online class in Spanish and that was fine. I got a B+ and put in minimal effort and I felt I got what I paid for: a letter saying I'm completed the course for under $200.
If we are to broaden the appeal of CC then a digital first approach should be applied, if Coursera can do that with it's affiliated Universities so can Community Colleges. They need to modernize to compete, and the Market will soon be filled with Gen Z that have all been priced out of University so it's a net boon if they do.
Moreover, I have seen the costs of CC, it's still way too expensive for what they offer. I was tempted to go back for a welding certification and try my hand at that but it was 1000s of dollars per class not including material costs! I saw what an Associates degree costs after I met a girl who had to drop out and wait tables, and it's on par with what my first semesters of University cost even as a local in Colorado.
Insanity...
I think the real thing that needs to be addressed is conflating college experience as a good gauge for professional experience in the work place; I'm a much bigger proponent of the Germanic model of apprenticeships, wherein you can opt out of High School to go into a trade and start a career when you're ready.
So many more options are available to you that way, and end up yielding some of the best people I ever worked with. Best of all, you don't waste your time studying something you may never end up working in, as so many do after completing their degrees.
The german system works like this:
The frist 4 years of education you'll got to Grundschule where you learn the basics.
Then you'll get sorted in the 3 different "high school" types.
- Hauptschule
- This type of school is the least academically demanding and has a lot more
hands on classes like woodworking/cooking and the likes.
- This take usualy 5 years to complete.
- This is the middle ground school it offers a bit of both worlds
- this takes 6 years to complete.
- This is the more acadamiclly focus type of school, with stuff like AP
classes.
- have to learn a thrid language
- takes 8 or 9 years
Appranticeships can be in trades, manufacturing, IT or office jobs. There is also Duales Studium where you go to collage but also work half time at a company.
As an example take my school journy: I was sorted into the Hauptschule.
After I completet that school, I added 2 more years school time so i get a Realschul depolma, as a bonus the school I went to also touth me the frist year of electricians apprenticeship.
After that I got a apprianticeship to become a software developer which took me 3 years to complete.
edit: formating and last paragraph
In Berlin for example the Grundschule is 6 years and then you go to either Gymnasium or Sekundarschule[1] for another 6, which offers either university-bound education or vocational education but generally everyone attending that wants to and is academically capable can get a highschool diploma out of it, allowing them to go to uni.
Works pretty well I'd say.
Why stress over admissions to prestigious schools like Cal, when you can just do 2 years at a trivially cheap institution (less than a $1k per quarter; you'll pay more in textbook fees), where you'll be taking lower division and general ed courses that are the same no matter where you take them, and save 2 years of tuition? Not to mention, if you're from out of state you can establish residency while at the cheaper CC.
Community colleges are way underrated.
That being said, they prioritize California community colleges when it comes to transfer admissions, so getting in via a CC is a little easier than trying to get in for regular 4 year admissions.
(IMHO during covid this option was king)
Crazy enough. That is a HUGE amount. CC isn't a huge funnel success -- stories are rare - most students drop out etc.
I sincerely doubt this for Stanford and CalTech. The only college of ~equivalent prestige to Stanford that takes a non trivial number of transfer students is Columbia and CalTech doesn’t have classes that teach material equivalent to CC courses. It’s assumed you know it already or will pick it up in an hour or two if you need it.
UC colleges are completely different because they’re forced to have a clear path for transfer students.
https://www.deanza.edu/articulation/guaranteed-admission/tag...
I'm 95% sure that didn't use to be the case. I am a transfer student from De Anza and I recall being torn between Berkeley and where I eventually did end up. Maybe it was dropped more recently?
Even without the guaranteed transfer though, the acceptance rate for transfers from local community colleges is waaay higher than applying out of high school. If you keep good grades (which is easy to do at CC because you're graded on a curve with classmates that aren't all in the same league) and apply every quarter/semester from the moment you're eligible, you're likely to get in before having exhausted classes to take at the 2 year college.
Have to disagree. There's a tremendous amount you could learn at a university (depending on the school, and the student, of course).
I've read many threads on HN where people (like myself) who had it easy in high school because we were naturally bright suddenly had to struggle tremendously at university because we hadn't learned how to study in high school, or because we were suddenly among many others who were as smart as ourselves and couldn't just coast.
The usefulness of what you learn will vary from school to school, subject to subject, and teacher to teacher. Simply getting access to talented teachers who are successful in their fields can be invaluable. Clubs and extracurricular activities could be important too, as can networking and friendships you strike up in school.
It's fashionable to bash universities these days[1], but you're really not going to get this stuff from books or videos. Not to mention the structure and motivation that classes and deadlines provide.
That said, I think a lot of students aren't ready for university right after coming out of high school. I know I got a lot more out of it when I came back to finish my degree as an adult, when I was far more motivated, mature, knew what I wanted to get out of school and how to get it.
[1] - somewhat justified by their outrageous fees in the US and the insane amount of debt many students are forced to take on
A lot of situations where prestige matters don't place any value on the knowledge learned in college anyway.
As luxury consumption, universities are far superior to community colleges. It's so incredibly cool to learn math from celebrities who literally wrote the book on the topic.
Actually, I might have been able to go back to a university under probation (is that the right term?) but I was too college-ignorant to know that.
Still, two years at a community college is in fact what I think I really needed at the time. Knocked out the first couple of years of prerequisites and for very little cash (my minimum wage job working at a pizza place paid for college + apartment ... this was 1984, FWIW). I even got Calc 1 and II behind me.
Fond memories.
This seems like something of an odd position. From one perspective, why do you need the degree? If you have the skill, then you have the skill.
But if you take the opposite perspective, and having a degree is important... community colleges don't award them. Go to a community college and you get an associate's degree, not a baccalaureate degree. It's kind of like having a GED.
> Why do people want to pay world-renown researchers to teach them programming 101? It is like having Stephen King teach introductory grammar
Well, they don't. That's why the classes are taught by nameless graduate students. The primary value proposition at an undergraduate school is the other undergraduates, not the lecturers.
This depends on the school, we have full professors teaching all the classes in my department (although they let us 'nameless' grad students do labs and I think discussion sections).
> The primary value proposition at an undergraduate school is the other undergraduates, not the lecturers.
That's somewhat fair -- although undergrads can do some research here, if they push for it.
And besides, at least the community colleges in my region feed into the big local university. Why do people want to pay world-renown researchers to teach them programming 101? It is like having Stephen King teach introductory grammar -- there just isn't that much enlightenment that can be packed into "the syntax of if statements."