I don't know why more people don't recommend community/junior colleges. You can cut the price of education almost in half if you start out 2 years at a JC.

I agree and disagree.

I spent a few years at a college before going to a university, and the (average) quality of teaching was actually higher at the college, for half the tuition. So insofar as post-secondary is about the stuff you learn in class, college is awesome. And I used to recommend it highly to any high-school-student who would listen.

However, there are some other benefits that are in short supply at colleges. Your peers will, on average, be less intelligent and less dedicated. And even if your peers are worth cultivating, you won't be living dorms, which means less parties (could be a pro or a con), but also means less close bonding with those same peers. Your instructors will not have openings in their labs where you can work for slave wages during the summer, getting five times as much real education as you got the preceding 8 months.

And ALSO, "cut the price in half" is completely disingenuous. Tuition is a fraction of the total cost of school: there's fees and books, of course. But more importantly, there's opportunity cost, usually represented by some kind of unskilled pay, perhaps $20k/year. In Vancouver in the early 2000s, college will run you roughly $250/course, and university $500/course. That sounds like half the price, until your calculation includes that $20k/year in lost salary (plus $1k-$2k in fees and supplies). Suddenly it's a $26k vs $22k, which is no savings worth talking about.

I'm going to a community college now (at 34) and it seems like the quality of teaching is very good but the grading is too generous. If I had lower ambitions, I could see myself getting by on an hour a week of study for each class while still earning good grades.

I am worried about the opportunity cost, in terms of networking with people, but I had no choice but to start in a community college due to poor high school grades. After 30 hours I can transfer, but I will probably stay since I can maintain my full time software developer job while in the community college. I don't think I'll be able to do that when I transfer to the university.

What I got out of JC:

- A good english teacher (Strunk and White). My writing improved tremendously.

- Calculus

- A taste for history

What I didn't get:

- Anything relevant to CS

- Any good math beyond calculus (they offered "statistics for business majors", which was really lame)

On the whole it was a good way for a self-learner to get some cheap learning out of the way, and also get some job experience (as a coop in the IT shop of a local government organization).

A couple of my friends went to a JC and went on to go to what I will define as "schools with recognizable names but not ivy league"-caliber 4 year schools and ended up getting less than half of their classes accepted as transferred largely due to technicalities.

They effectively had to go through 4 years of college anyway, they could have saved just as much by enrolling immediately and taking JC courses over the summers and graduated in 4 years instead of 5-6.

This is where research pays off. Community college advisers, at least at my school, are very bad. In Illinois all of the schools have a complete transfer database online at uselect.org.

I think it's better to enroll in a 4 year university, and then take all the classes you can at a local JC and transfer them over. That way you avoid yet another admissions gauntlet and will be checking if things transfer for every class.