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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Weird post, OP.  No they don't.  community colleges hire the cheapest they can find.  Adjuncts.  Mostly at $1500 a course.  Our experience at a community college was abysmal. The teacher was teaching the same course in 3 difference community college locations (same system) and clearly was just phoning it in.[/quote]

a. Everyone's situation is different. Some community colleges are great. Some community college instructors are wonderful. Many of the students are wonderful, determined people. Many alumni of community colleges are wonderful.

And the same is true of the for-profit colleges, like the University of Phoenix. I know someone with a master's from the University of Phoenix. I've never talked to her about the degree, and I don't know what the degree program was like, but the individual with the degree is a wonderful person.

If someone reading this is associated with a good community college, attends such a college, or is an alumni of such a college: Please do not take the following as criticism of you.

b. My impression is that a community college group has hired a social media outreach firm to promote community colleges on message boards.

Certainly, community colleges are great institutions that should be supported, and they provide wonderful opportunities for some.

But, in the real world, at this time, on average, they don't provide the kind of access to opportunity that going to a four-year college provides.

This study shows that only 14 percent of the students who start at a community college end up getting a four-year degree within six years, even though 75 percent want a four-year degree:

https://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/publications/tracking-transfer-institutional-state-effectiveness.html  (Note that about 90 percent of these students came out of public or private nonprofit schools.)

At four-year colleges with open admissions policies, which are coming under fire for not having enough students graduate, 32 percent of the students graduate within four years:

https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=40

So, in other words: students who start at the kinds of four-year schools with no prestige at all are more than twice as likely to get a four-year degree as students who start at two-year colleges.

Only 29 percent of the students who seek a certificate or associate's degree at community colleges get the degrees within three years:

https://postsecondary.gatesfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/A-Primer-on-the-College-Student-Journey.pdf

Seventy percent of "rising juniors" at a four-year college end up with a bachelor's degree, compared with just 45% of juniors who transferred in:

https://www.jkcf.org/research/the-promise-of-the-transfer-pathway-opportunity-and-challenge-for-community-college-students-seeking-the-baccalaureate-degree/

Obviously, a lot of this has to do with many of the students starting at two-year schools having academic and financial problems. But some of the graduation gap may have to do the quality of the classes at the two-year colleges.

Even if everyone at a community college means well: It's going to be hard to offer a tough differential equations class at a community college. Any community college instructor with a heart is going to see how hard the students are working and give them better grades than they would have gotten at UVa or Virginia Tech.

And some of the gap is probably due to the four-year colleges being nasty about financial aid and rejecting perfectly good transfer credits.

That means that, even if a community college does everything it possibly can to offer its students the same level of rigor they'd get at a four-year college, and the students themselves are fine students, the transfer students who enter a four-year college will often go into the four-year college with a community college anvil on their backs.

I think that this is why it's so upsetting for me to see people telling other parents, "Well, your bright, serious kid with a 3.7 unweighted GPA, 1450 on the SATs and run-of-the-mill extracurriculars can just go to community college and then transfer to some place like George Mason. That's better than starting at Podunk 4-Year State College."

If we're talking about a student with a 3.1 GPA and 1100 on the SATs who was not that great about turning in homework: OK, them's the breaks.

But I think it's sad that we're being pushed to think that it's trivial to put the community college anvil on the back of students with 3.7 unweighted GPAs and 1450 on the SATs who happen to be in the financial aid doughnut hole. I think it would be good to create better aid programs for bright students who are in the doughnut hole, to help them start out at four-year colleges and increase the odds they'll end up with degrees.[/quote]

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