Is attending community college (CC) shameful?

Notwithstanding the fact that most people here will ferociously defend the “right” answer according dignity to everyone who tries their best within their means and all that blah, the real world answer is that there is a glass ceiling above which your education will be looked down upon if you don’t have a college degree. It doesn’t matter that many people even with a college degree haven’t actually learned squat.

The rest of the world doesn’t care that you are working hard. If you are poor, it just sucks, sorry. If you manage to get out of poverty, education matters much less. There may be exceptions, but these are the general rules of engagement in society.

There is nothing wrong with community college. The only downside is that they often lack sports teams. If I grew up in CA where there is a robust comm college sports league, I'd have considered it. You can save a ton of money. That said, your traditional college experience will be halved (assuming you are using it as a stepping stone towards a bachelors). For most people being away for 4 years of college is the best time of their life.

if you have no choice, juco it is. i wouldn't even bother fretting, is what it is. get to work. if you have a choice, it boils down to your abilities/ needs/ wishes. a student needing remedial/ study skills work, to either learn how to be a competent student or to mature and buckle down and study, or to work through some sort of disability type issue, might be better served taking their basics at juco and saving money. money in general can be a "Thing." i will be paying for my degrees for decades.

that being said, some of my best buddies are my college pals. i got to play on decently funded sports teams. i still follow my college sports teams. and then the biggest difference to me is the better the school gets the more you are being taught HOW TO THINK and the less IMO it's rote memorization tests. which to me is the difference between being taught to think for yourself and lead, versus vocational training to be a subordinate. i wouldn't trade that education for anything,

however, as a poor kid with some debt, i wish it was cheaper. which is the appeal of juco. IMO you trade some of the 4 year experience, sports funding, and such, for less of a financial burden once you're out. but you may also trade some attractiveness to employers as well.

but i mean fwiw there is a juco called deep springs in CA with an elite student body headed off to the best schools. some of it is what you do with your time. if you work your butt off and make good grades, you can transfer well and get the back end of the college experience. if you goof around you're wasting your time but at least doing so cheaply.

I know someone who went to a very low-cost community college and got a 2 year associates degree with a 3.9 GPA. That performance allowed him to get a 2 year, full academic scholarship for his junior and senior year of college, in pre-medical studies. He then went to medical school, and because of the fact his undergraduate studies cost very little money, was able to graduate medical school with very low debt, compared to his classmates, some of whom had 2-3 times the student debt.

I see no shame in what did. In fact it was a smart pathway, that worked out well for him.

This! With university costs/fees so ridiculously high, community college credits for basic requirements isn’t a bad route.

When I went to CC there were instructors who also were professionals in their field and also taught at 4 year institutions. Some of my classes were easily 4 year quality and difficulty. Plus a lot of the students there were from my high school, the more popular and intelligent ones that easily could've qualified directly into university. Also as an adult I have used CC as a tuneup for expanding knowledge in various subjects.

Not shameful, could be a good decision but I think there is a higher likely of not getting a bachelors degrees by the end of the process than if you go straight to a 4 year school… and you definitely don’t get the same “college experience” of dorm life, living and going to class with people from different parts of the state/country/world and moving away from home. All very valuable and some of the things you can’t just learn anywhere and it’s fun af.

Honestly, I wish I went to a community college first. I wasn't focused enough to attend a 4 year university and had no idea what I wanted to do. Attending a community college would have given me a chance to explore different careers and not feel so much pressure to declare my major without thinking about what was next. The university I attended was highly academic, so the focus was on further education versus coming out of college prepared for a career. To add, I have a couple of friends who attended CC and now have their PhD. I believe it gave them a chance to get the grades they didn't have in highschool, improved their confidence, and gave them time to decide what exactly they wanted to do.

to throw one spanner in the works, there are some "work colleges" like berea that are 4 years with free or reduced tuition for students but have a work requirement around campus. they aren't very publicized.

also the academies but you have a military obligation afterwards and can end up sent off to war. and some of the ivies and other schools make the schools tuition free below a parental income threshold. there are some intermediate choices if expense is an issue.

Nice cope. You are delusional if you think any CC’s computer science courses are even in the same realm as those at Stanford.

i think some of the posts above point to a particular theory on the tradeoff. some people are more "experiential." some people this is more of a "vocational" way station on the way to a job, or more strictly hemmed in by a desire to have zero or low debt. some above would point to like he got a MD after juco. i am sure that happens. i also think that's going to be a particular wiring of a person, grade focused, studying all the time, job driven.

i think this clash is seen in society at large. you have the folks who want to get rid of humanities departments and focus on perceived vocational prograns. and then you have folks like me whose first degree was humanities and did fine. the leading yale major is history. but those students are often unusually wealthy and see their degree as so good they do not have to be practical. IMO there is a class/priorities element in this discussion.

Btw if you go to CC your chances of transferring to a top-10 school like Stanford or Harvard are almost 0%

My son went to a community college, then transitioned to the state's flagship university, where he took B.A.-confirming courses, and now he identifies as a four-year college graduate, and I think that's great. Support your children!

the people saying x went to juco and made a 3.9, went to grad school, i am sure that is real. but i also agree with the one saying it's not stanford. it's an easier 3.9. the higher up the food chain the more you will be challenged and asked what you think. the lower down, the more you will be asked to memorize.

it's basically the difference between what in HS you would know as an "honors" or "gifted" class versus a normal track class. you both took something called the same, and went over some basics, but the one class will speed through that to next level stuff.

bluntly i would consider whether you are good at memorizing versus more of a conceptual thinker. juco type classes to me can actually be tricky if you aren't a good memorizer. vs. at a good liberal arts school like mine we would spend a minimum of a history test -- maybe half -- on names and dates and such.

along those lines i think one thing a lot of aspiring college students miss is like how do their aptitudes, their personal gifts, fit their major and the school they went to. some majors are more about memorization. some schools are. some are more about conceptual understanding and big picture thinking.

Not true, Stanford takes a small percentage of students from community college. It's California, life is expensive.

Harvard I have no idea.

Harvard & Stanford aren't the only two schools to transfer to though.

Yes and that small percentage is almost 0%. It’s far easier to get into Stanford out of HS which is itself already quite difficult

Less than 2% of the student body are transfers. Less than 1% are transfers from JUCOs. The transfer requirements are similar to high school entrance. Thousands of 4.0 and 35 ACT students get rejected. How many JUCO students have a 35?

Watch the news much? See all the "smart critical thinkers" sign published statements supporting Hamas? They're at Ivy League schools. If they were truly smart and realized how many influential Jewish people there were in finance, law, business, and government who might take issue with supporting a terrorist group, they might have been able to think a few steps ahead in time to weigh the consequences of their choices.

This is a Rudy problem. People love control. They crave it above anything else. But some times you're someone like Rudy... the slow and diminutive try hard who wanted so badly to be a Notre Dame football player. But the problem was Rudy wasn't very good at football nor was he a particularly gifted student. Worst of all, he had no control over this. But no matter, Rudy came of an age in a time where anyone can fabricate a story (most of the movie is made up) and pitch it to the establishment folks who gatekeep and pervert credential granting mechanisms, which is what college has become, for their own ends.

People that are gifted critical thinkers are almost invariably higher in IQ. It's high IQ that got the first caveman to amble away from the feasting on the corpse of a wooly mammoth and take a rock and start hammering away at it to see if the abstract circular object in his caveman brain had any real-world applications. It's an innate sense of curiosity and subsequent line of inquiry that you're either born with or you're not. IQ is a very troublesome thing in this world because it's not something people can control. If you're someone who likes to gatekeep, like the folks who willingly clicked on a CC thread to insult the participants in the conversation, it drives you crazy that despite pedigree, material wealth, and social connections, some poor Jew from an Eastern bloc country can do something with nothing and end up accomplishing quite a bit in a Western society, and probably more happily than the gatekeeper ever will experience in their life.

To a certain extent, if you want to achieve the highest status in any given society, you need to play the game. You have to grind throughout high school to get a 4.0 GPA and all the extracurriculars, go to a top 10 university, land the right internship, have the right "friends" you met at top 10 university, get the right first job... all of this to become an influential lawyer, businessman, finance professional, government czar or politician, whatever. But the reality is that there is a very real cost to this from a social, mental, emotional, and perhaps even physical perspective. It's not "coping" to acknowledge that people who live with an "all or nothing" mentality around achievement tend to deal with difficulties in life. Different kind of life, different kind of problems.

You have to take the good with the bad, but you still need to choose.

None of the kids in any of these schools have a lick of sense, even if some are well trained in this or that. Being at a 4 year college is nothing to be proud of, you're still 20 years old and know pretty much nothing