Are university courses harder than community college counterparts?

School person wrote:

Is 101 at a good university harder than the same course at a community college?

A fairer comparison; "Is 101 at a good university harder than the same course at a GOOD community college?". From my experience, the standards at community colleges vary widely. To be frank, some CCs are nothing more than remedial school, their focus is on fixing deficiencies from H.S. and certification programs. Professors at some low tier CCs will skip over the difficult parts of course materials and preparing kids for a 4 year school is simply not their focus. Some universities are aware of the low standards at some the low tier CCs and will reject certain course from those schools. I have seen CC graduates lose nearly a year of coursework, when transferring to a university.

I have taught at a CC and a University and as other have indicated, the lowest level courses materials are about the same. At one point I was teaching the same course, with the same text book, at the same time at a CC and a University. At the end of the semester, the CC and university grades were about the same. You can see the differences between a CC and university mainly at the start of classes. The university kids can move faster because most of them were good H.S. students and already know half of the course materials, and they know how to study and pass tests. However, about halfway through the semester, those CC kids who weren't good H.S. students, with help start to catch up and those hardworking adult learners start to get their college student sea legs, at that point, the CC and university experience is about the same.

With all of that said, a lot of H.S. kids are not ready for the university experience and would do better spending 2 years at a CC and save their parents a lot of money as well. I think CCs are an option more American should explore.

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One word of warning if you are looking to transfer credits.

Check with the school that you want to attend to see what courses transfer BEFORE taking the CC course. This will save you a lot of trouble potentially.

If you get the Associate's degree from the CC then you are in a different set (most likely better) set of circumstances.

yes.

adk22 wrote:

University courses are harder because the teachers are worse.

Absolutely false. I could not believe the jokes of a class that I observed in some of the community colleges and lower level CUNY schools. Graduate students do a good deal of the teaching at community colleges and they are hit or miss--some quite good but a lot of these courses should not have college credit for them. In some cases, I had no idea what was the connection to the alleged subject material of the class. The university classes taught by professors that I have observed, outside of those lower level CUNY schools, have been first-rate. The professors knew their material extremely well and knew how to teach.

School person wrote:

Is 101 at a good university harder than the same course at a community college?

Depends on the school. While in grad school at UCLA, organic and biochemistry was one of the pre-requisites I never got around to taking as an undergrad. So I thought I'd take the easy way out and take it at Santa Monica College as I thought it would be easier.........it certainly was less expensive than at UCLA. On the first day I was ecstatic.........the professor comes in, had a t-shirt on with the picture of a fish and the caption "walleye fever, catch it". Had blue jeans, hair in a ponytail down to the middle of his back and sandals on. Had glasses so thick they looked like he was looking through the bottom of coke bottles. He intros himself, then calmly says he had his MS in organic and bio from MIT, and his PhD from UCLA, and worked for NASA previously developing space food for the Mercury space program. So in my case, the answer was "no".

University courses must be harder. More prestige (no matter how much that may be) usually correlates to more challenging academics. I'm sure there are exceptions, but in general classes at a university are more difficult.

bibimbap wrote:

University courses must be harder. More prestige (no matter how much that may be) usually correlates to more challenging academics. I'm sure there are exceptions, but in general classes at a university are more difficult.

Even though university class curves will be more punishing (generally), the content among lower div courses is pretty much the same, especially at a good CC.

More prestige =! more challenging academics. Harvard and Brown are more prestigious undergrad schools than Berkeley, UCLA, Georgia Tech etc, but have significantly more grade inflation for lower div courses covering exactly the same material.

Classes are the same at community colleges. Just like teams and coaches are the same at community colleges. Blue chip recruits regularly say no thanks to big programs because they want to go to a community college.

Me go CC wrote:

Classes are the same at community colleges. Just like teams and coaches are the same at community colleges. Blue chip recruits regularly say no thanks to big programs because they want to go to a community college.

A good friend of mine took a year off Stanford in order to get treatment for severe anorexia nervosa. She ended up attending her local community college for two quarters; all her lower division courses articulated, and she got credit for two quarters of Chemistry, Biology, and Calc.

The 60k/year for private school has less to do with the content/difficulty of classes and more to do with the quality of instruction, personalized attention, etc.

That being said, instructional quality at CCs can be very good, especially in lower div STEM courses, which are often taught or heavily led by TAs at universities and usually led by professors at CCs. There is an oversaturation of STEM doctorates in the US, so plenty of excellent physics/chemistry/math/engineering PhD grads who either don't want to fight through the rat race of serious academia or would rather teach than do research work at CCs.