Community colleges are drastically under-rated I think. We've ended up in a weird situation where inexpensive teaching-first institutions (Universities are really better set up for generating research) have, essentially, no prestige for some reason. But it is 2022, we don't have to become computer scientists and invent new theories to program the dang things. Programming-as-a-trade is a niche that needs to be filled, and a place that'll let you bang out a degree in a couple years, focused on practical stuff, ought to be... if not the default path, at least a significant one.
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."
I went to my local community college for CS after graduating from a top university in underwater basket weaving, and tbh it was pretty good and did not feel like a noticeable step down in quality from my former university (perhaps more of an indictment of expensive universities).
We do need to reduce the stigma of community colleges, they fulfill an important need.
I went to Oxford, where they give you actual 3/2/1-on-1 tutorials several times a week. You get to sit in a comfy room with an actual world renowned professor in the appropriate field.
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.
My brother did his masters in operations research at Stanford after doing his undergraduate degree in our home country that is ranked in the 200-300 range. His full undergrad cost 20kish, his masters cost (at least on paper as he got various fee reductions etc) over 100k.
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.
There’s real value in company/community college partnerships - they’ve been common for factory-type work for decades (go to the college and learn the machines, get hired at the company afterwards) and companies willing to admit this can work could get lots of good talent in other areas.
Not all major(ish) colleges are an arm and leg the way the Ivy's and some other upper crust/common names are. Certainly there are many very good state institutions at relatively reasonable cost/value. Michigan State is order 15K tuition for in-state.
My in-state school had similar tuition (in 10yrs ago dollars) and had guaranteed, no-questions-asked scholarships that covered most of it if you exceeded an SAT or ACT score (not a super high one either).
> We do need to reduce the stigma of community colleges, they fulfill an important need.
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.
I'm sure there is a German or two here who can chime in with the specifics, but the parent poster shared a somewhat abbreviated version of the story. There are multiple kinds of high school in Germany (and other European nations) whereby you can opt into the right kind of school to fit your talents and needs. So what they likely meant was Gymnasium, which is traditionally viewed as a university bound high school program. Other students will go to other kinds of more hands-on schools that I'd say are no less rigorous or well-rounded, just different.
So I'm going to be the german who is going to chime in.
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.
- Realschule
- This is the middle ground school it offers a bit of both worlds
- this takes 6 years to complete.
- Gymnasium
- 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
But after you complete Hauptschule or Realschule you can go do an apprenticeship or add on some more school years to get the better school diploma.
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.
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.
We are seeing some of that in the US in the form of charter schools. We have one locally that is focused more on trades and technology, and goes all the way from middle school through high school. Traditionally, you'd go to the regular public school if you were interested in post-secondary education. Not that you couldn't go to college if you went to the charter school, just that isn't the focus. You get an equivalent high school diploma either way.
I think that sounds a bit more voluntary than it actually is.
Some argue its to early to decide after elementary school to decide who will likely study and who won't.
After elementary may be too early. In my country most of selection is at year 9 (pupils being 14-15 y/o). That's not a hard cut off though. Technically you take same exam and may go to university if you want. But if you picked arts school, you probably won't do well in exams needed for STEM at university...
This is somewhat out of date as modern day system in Germany is a lot less exclusionary and less prone to railroading pupils to vocational education than it was 20-30 years ago. This also depends on state, in Berlin for example basically any capable/motivated pupil can get an Abitur by attending an Integrierte Sekundarschule.
In Australia, while there are some specialist high schools with a different focus (e.g., agricultural sciences) students can otherwise take on a trade apprenticeship from Year 10 (15ish yo) as part of completing their secondary schooling.
Case in point: De Anza College in Cupertino has a guaranteed admissions agreement with many UC schools, including Berkeley and (I think?) UCLA. Anyone can go to De Anza college, and the guaranteed transfer agreement allows anyone with a good enough GPA and enough course credits to get in to Berkeley.
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.
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.
It gets better. Due to drop out rates of first and second year students at first tier schools - there are vast openings for juniors [schools lose tuition]. UC Berkeley, Standford, CalTech are super motivated - have streamlined systems to take in strong CC students. Honestly, if you get all As, cover the same two years [you need a detailed plan signed off on] - you can write your own ticket.
Transfer rates for Stanford has been extremely low historically: 42 admits out of 1,959 applicants in 2016 (https://admission.stanford.edu/apply/selection/profile16.htm...). I believe Caltech is even lower (single digits) as they only matriculate 250 freshmen every year. I certainly won’t count on getting admitted to either of those colleges as a transfer student even if you get straight As.
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.
I’m pretty sure there is a guarantee that you can get admission at one of the UC campuses. That includes, for example, UC riverside or Merced which are very different from UCLA and UC berkeley
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.
Absolutely. I graduated with an Associate's degree from De Anza while already working in industry, then transferred to Cal State to complete my B.S. in C.S.
I did it all while working and all without taking out a single student loan or any external (like family) support.
Post-secondary education is more about signalling than learning. It's more about where you got in (to an exclusive and selective institution,) and that you finished, than whether they taught you anything useful. A question which might help you see this clearly: would you rather have an MIT diploma, or the knowledge you could acquire at MIT (assuming you can have only one)?
"Post-secondary education is more about signalling than learning."
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
Add to that closely knowing a bunch of other people who went to MIT (don’t discount this, think all-nighters, group projects, hellish classes etc) who could also afford it, and you got it about right.
It's such a worn argument at this point, I don't think it's worth revisiting unless you add anything beyond the assertion. I know I gained far more from what I learned than from the degree; nobody ever asked where my degree was from.
Maybe I am out of touch but I would certainly prefer the knowledge. Sure, a degree from MIT would help me get a few interviews but I wouldn't be qualified for any of the jobs without the knowledge.
I took a db class (Oracle) at a local community for kicks. My instructor was a former Wells Fargo executive - and knew every line of Oracle. He was rich - but his wife made him leave the house. His battle stories were incredible. I then took a physics class from a professor that retired from doing car wreck reconstruction. I will say - community college professors are more interesting than 24 year old grad students.
> We've ended up in a weird situation where inexpensive teaching-first institutions (Universities are really better set up for generating research) have, essentially, no prestige for some reason.
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.
Did two years at JuCo because I fucked up my first semester at a university.
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.
I did the same thing, I got into partying and drugs and failed out of school. Ended up at CC for a bit. I just did liberal arts, coasted, got my credits, worked and matured a bit and finished up at a different university. I overall enjoyed my time there. Just being 19-20 was an interesting time in general. I liked that I could just take classes that seemed interesting. I took things like bowling, tv production, hebrew lol
> a place that'll let you bang out a degree in a couple years, focused on practical stuff, ought to be... if not the default path, at least a significant one.
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.
> Well, they don't. That's why the classes are taught by nameless graduate students.
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.
Often you even get the world-class professors when you’re at a community college in a town with a big famous school. Lots of UT professors will pick up extra classes at ACC here and there.
The programming-as-a-trade niche is filled by bootcamps. There are longer term bootcamps, if you think three months is too short. Bad signaling/reputation is the main negative about bootcamps and why many people prefer to go to a university.
One of the biggest drawbacks in the community college experience is the cohort. Not that it's any better at a lot of universities either, but the one thing I learnt the most from in college was my peers. Some of the problems like poor course structure, aged curriculum, lack of effort from professors, repetition etc. exists even in top tier universities like Stanford or Berkeley. However, you get some of the smartest minds as your peers, TAs, dates or roommates. Not only do you learn through them in classes, homeworks, project groups etc., but a lot of them go out and work as interns in some of the biggest names in tech. They bring so much knowledge and exposure with them, you benefit from even the smallest of the interactions.
The only reason I learnt about git and aliasing commands in shell was because I was sitting next to this kid who did his internship at a cool tech company after their freshman year.
This was one of the things I loved about my community college / transfer-to-a-commuter-state-school experience: once you got through about a year of the program, 90% of the people left were pretty serious about improving their lives with their education. A lot of "nontraditional" students, older students, people with kids, etc. Yeah, it sucked that only a scant handful of people got internships with any prestige attached, but if you actually cared about learning from each other you got the opportunity to. (Even there, I learned a ton from the guy sitting next to me flexing his vim skills and shit-talking the databases professor -- there's always somebody!)
For the vast majority of people, the alternative to that isn't Stanford -- it's some "traditional" four-year institution where a good portion of your classmates are really there to plagiarize and finesse some early-stage alcoholism. A lot of my community college classmates may not have been "the smartest minds", but having an environment where people cared was far better for my learning than the time at a private school I'd spent in courses full of hungover rich kids.
I went to Community College of Rhode Island (00 - 05) and I enjoyed it quite a bit and felt, while I had some weird and unnecessary courses, I actually learned quite a bit. I recommend community college of those who can't get a traditional university education for financial, family obligations, or other reasons.
In 98, I started working for an internet company (right, when the internet was becoming commonplace), and in 2000, graduated from high school. I was admitted to the University of Rhode Island and didn't like it at all -- I was commuter and spent most of the time I wasn't at school at my job. I dropped out 3 days into my second semester.
I worked for several years at that company full-time going to night school 3-4 nights a week; I went on to become a junior developer at Berklee College of Music (building their online music school), promoted to senior, and then a manager of team there. Once I graduated from CCRI, I moved to Northeastern University and did the online program, which was quite new in 2006, and then to finish my final requirements, took them at night after I worked my 9-5 at Berklee. I'm now a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University -- a top-tier research university working on resilience engineering; I'm proposing this year and hoping to defend about 1.5 years from now.
I had to take a lot of weird course during my CCRI experience. I had to take introduction to computers in 00: the professor actually gave a quiz at the start of class each week and I would show up late because I worked a real job. I failed the first semester: one of the quizzes was on using the mouse. I also took introduction to the internet. However, I basically got an immediate A because the university bought internet access through my company and I was the contact. I had to take classes on Microsoft Excel, Word, Access, etc. I passed them. This is peak 2000.
By far, the most important classes I ever took were the following:
- Intro, Intermediate, Advanced C# programming. I never did C# programming before, .NET was VERY NEW and I we wrote a few desktop programs. The professor was hard; I got an A for building a CIDR subnet calculator, which no one understood because... hey, it was 2001. I didn't touch .NET until I got a research internship position at Microsoft Research in Redmond where I had to program C# and somewhat knew what I was doing.
- Advanced Databases. While I had to build everything in Microsoft Access, my professor made our project group go to another organization in the university, interview them about their problems, and build a database and form interface for interacting with it based on our interviews. This was the most real software engineering course I ever took, until I taught CMU-313, which is designed that way. Let me emphasize the time difference here: that course I took at CCRI was in 2002/3 and I taught CMU-313 in 2021. We need more of that style of course.
All in all -- do community college if that's what you have access to, work hard, work with your professors, and it will (hopefully) not be a limiting factor.
I should be clear
(as both someone who experienced this and as someone who has been involved in MS/Ph.D admissions):
Brown University admitted me as a "special student" and allowed me to take master's courses as long as I paid the $6k fee per course (in 2013), but when asked about pursuing an actual master's or Ph.D. level degree, I was told, rather disrespectfully, that there was absolutely no chance since I didn't have a computer science degree from a major university. Therefore, I had to independently seek out my own research opportunities to build a resume that would allow me to be admitted to an actual CV institution.
Therefore, I would say that if your goal is research focus on the more traditional path.
I am forever thankful for California community colleges. I did not the best high school slacked off mostly c's doing the bare minimum. Went to local community college loved it took so many amazing classes with great teacher. I transferred to uc Davis with admissions under contract if hekd certain gpa. Cost me about 4k for two year in fees and books. At uc Davis for 2 years 30k. I learned more at my community college than a pretty decent public research college. Still uc Davis was worth it worked as student employee doing computer support. Turned that into full time job at the college as computer programmer and then gotA
e jobs making way more doing the same thing. Never got CS degree just got chance to some cool things I had no business doing. All thanks to community college
> I learned more at my community college than a pretty decent public research college.
I've heard "I learned more at X than at college" multiple times, it's become a refrain. But public university courses are pretty intellectually intensive, or at least provide good opportunities to be so; I wonder if people who say these implicitly qualify it with "that I valued / that I found was useful to my (intended) career"
I think another aspect of it is that professors at research universities don't view teaching as their main vocation but as something they have to do (their "real" job is research/writing papers). I think lecturers that focus on teaching can probably be better at it, especially at undergrad level where you're anyway pretty far from the state of the art.
> professors at research universities don't view teaching as their main vocation but as something they have to do (their "real" job is research/writing papers).
Some of them view it this way, and end up being excellent lecturers. They get laid off for not publishing often enough or successfully enough. Like the one statistics professor I've had that was worth a damn.
I find universities forcing both research and teaching on the same people quite bewildering nowadays. Yes, you used to be able to get super fresh information directly from the people doing the research back in the day, but guess what, nowadays that's not what's in the curriculum anyway and your lecturer doing great research probably won't really translate into them being able to better teach the basics of their field.
Same. My peers were going crazy trying to get ready for university. Once my plan was to do community college and transfer, the last two years of high school became really easy. Tuition was something like $11/unit, and textbooks were actually a bigger expense.
I have a 4 year degree from a state school now, and even though I missed out on some of the dorm shenanigans/networking/etc, I’m doing just fine now. And I never had any student loans to worry about. (Admittedly, my parents did help pay for my degree, but $2500/semester at a state university is very, very reasonable.)
My wife went to a CC before going to a 4-year university. The challenge of studying in a CC, at least to some students, is that CC's courses are not rigorous enough. The courses are on par with those AP courses. For instance, their Calculus class focused on derivatives and integrations, while spending far less time discussing fundamentals like definition of limits, convergent functions, series, or boundary conditions in differential equations. Needless to say, they touched little on proofs, either. Their linear algebra class focuses more on matrix calculation than properties of vector space. Similarly, there were few proofs in their Discrete Maths course, little discussion on computational complexity or computability in algorithms class, no comprehensive projects on data structures like balanced trees, or graph algorithms beyond simple search.
These are not inherent problems with CC, but lacking rigorous course does impose a challenge to the students who aspire to be transferred to a 4-year college to study STEM, as they often felt insufficiently equipped to take more advanced courses in universities.
I went to a cc as part of a high school program. The math department was sooo much better at teaching and having passion for the subject than when I arrived at univesity.
This was my experience as well. I went to cc prior to going to a 4-year institution for CS. The instruction in the math classes at my local community college were far more impressive than anything I've ever taken anywhere else.
My theory on why this is the case is that they are prepared to teach math to 30-somethings who haven't cracked open a math textbook in a decade+.
50% of my cc student body was high school students in that program. That cohort was higher achieving than the average hs student.
I think the big difference was that they were there to teach, not do research. They would have left for engineering or s/w jobs long ago I they didn't actually love teaching
Maybe my experience was in part shaped by the fact that I took classes at night. Were the classes you took exclusive to members of the dual credit program? It does make sense, as basically every teacher I had at my cc was phenomenal. Though I did go to a truly massive cc.
This is anecdotal, but this is the opposite of my experience. I attended a community college in Los Angeles and its math and science courses were very rigorous. I had no trouble keeping up when I eventually transferred to a CSU (California State University).
Yea, this was my experience as well. There is a remarkable gap between a community college and a 4-year when it comes to rigor. One of my most favorite teachers back in CC was one with a super terrible ratemyprofessor score, because he expected a whole lot more out of us than just shallow learning.
As a poor kid in WV, where I'd be the first in my family to attend college, I had no idea how any of this worked, so when the DeVry salesman showed up at my school and got pointed to me (I was self taught on computers, writing rudimentary programs, and I made a web page for the marching band, which got me in the school newspaper (it was 1998)), I was a sucker for the spiel. He glanced at my torn-open computer case, hard-wired into a cabinet stereo, with printouts on the wall, and told me that I belonged at DeVry, where I'd be surrounded by people like myself, and I bought it hook, line, and sinker.
I went to DeVry Columbus, and it took me a couple of semesters before I figured out the scam. Expose the students to as many languages as possible; give them an incredibly wide array of the shallowest experiences, so that when they graduated, they could say to potential employers, "yes, I've had experience with that".
Had I finished, I would have taken courses in Visual Basic, C, C++, Java, and Cobol. I would have had zero (0) classes on algorithms or data structures. No discrete math. I quit in my third semester when we had spent our 4th or 5th week fine-tuning printf output for an ATM simulator.
I had a tech support job at a call center farm when I left, so I just kept on with that. Used it to get another tech support job at a mom and pop ISP. I was made a sysadmin there, and eventually left to be a sysadmin at a fintech startup because they happened to use the same distro I did (Slackware, weirdly enough). Left there, and through my network of connections, got a job at Northeastern University in Boston, even though I still didn't have a degree (that took some negotiating on my and my boss's part). Stayed there for a few years and loved it, but got an interview at a private aerospace firm in 2015, and got hired there as an IT Systems Administrator, again, without a degree. After 4 years, they promoted me to IT Systems Engineer, and then to Senior, then to Lead. Now I help run one of the coolest ISPs in the world.
I'm very very fortunate that I've spent my career trying extremely hard to get better at whatever it was that I was doing at the time. I really wish I had made a better choice of college early on, because I feel like I could have ended up where I am faster, and be better at it than I am, but I'm grateful I've had the chances I have, and the help where I've gotten it. But it hasn't been easy, and a better college could have made a big difference.
Yes, community colleges often have better pipelines into jobs than 4-year schools. Not always, and not for all programs, but for programs where you're learning a trade--usually an AAS degree-- it's common. Though unfortunately AAS degrees usually have fewer courses that can be applied to a 4-year degree down the road. It's a trade off: less expensive & faster path to employability vs. longer term career growth. If you find yourself needing/wanting the full degree later on then on average you'll end up taking more coursework than if you started on a 4 year track.
Anyway, community colleges are highly underrated for this. Lots of people go to 4 year schools out of inertia, not knowing what they want to do and not particularly motivated by anything except social pressure. Much better to figure things out during a relatively inexpensive year or two at a community college in that case. If nothing clicks for you, track into a trades program you can live with to pay the bills. If something clicks, you can be do the same with it, or transfer the work done so far into a 4 year school to finish off.
> All I can really say is the people who think community college is just as good as university are wrong – but so are the people who say it’s worse. There’s not really a comparison, because they’re different in what they set out to do. It’s just a shame that people suited more for one than the other are encouraged or forced to go down the wrong path for them.
Interesting that the author completely misses that the criticism is 100% about social class. Vocational school and community college are seen as bad or low quality because they don’t give their graduates the habitus of the middle class, the same way elite colleges are seen as excellent because far more reliably than directional state u they acculturate their graduates to the professional managerial class.
Here in California, if you spend two years in a CC and get decent grades you’re guaranteed a place in a UC. That’s much better odds than just applying directly.
I’ve hired a few people who took this path and every one has been outstanding. Unfortunately people mostly seem mbarassed to admit they did this.
One general advantage of community colleges is that the instructors often have closer ties to industry (and more industry experience) then you might find in many four-year colleges. This means you'll hear about things like devops pipelines that might be ignored in more academic settings. There also might be more courses like networking from the ground up, including skills like building the physical layer of a network, i.e. switches, cabling, etc. It's often a lot more practical than the academic world. This really fills the need for things like two-year vocational programming programs aimed at going right into the job market.
There's also a good argument for the four-year college bound that general ed courses at a university are a huge waste of money. Completing such requirements at a CC is often a better experience than sitting in huge auditoriums with several hundered other students in terms of getting one-on-one help. However, advanced courses at four-year research universities offer opportunities that CCs can't match, like working with cutting-edge technology or doing internships/work-study with real research groups.
Where some CCs kind of flail about is when they get into internal conflicts over whether they want to (1) pipeline high school students to four-year universities by meeting gen ed requirements, or (2) serve as a vocational program/ continuing education for older second-career students or those not headed for a four-year college. It seems possible to do both... but they often have funding problems.
The thing about gamer-attracted high school entrants and attrition is a problem worldwide, not just community college in the US.
We do a terrible of job of helping kids to work out whats a good study plan, and the belief "turn your hobby into your jobbie" is sometimes really toxic. Very few kids realize they might be a good fit in Orthodontics (aside from money) or Pathology, or even Argon-gas welding. We don't know how to work out how aptitude and interest and drive intersect here, beyond the trivial.
I think a bit about this because I went to a UK redbrick 40+ years ago to do joint ecology computing and came out with an average computing single honours, and never lacked for work but I continue to wonder why I washed out of ecology, the friends I kept who remained on that course had fantastic impact in the world, in ways I respect immensely. I had worked for a year in a marine biology lab before entry, nothing on that course was foreign to me: I just did too much dope and didn't work hard, not uncommon for a 20 year old.
If you plan yourself you can still probably return and finish it up, with your older person discipline you would be able to ace it and make a career out of it
Oddly enough, I think someone like the author (self-taught background but perhaps lacking fundamentals), would thrive at a top computer science university. Of course, the difficulty is getting in.
My experience at Berkeley is that all of the topic specific classes were very well taught and rigorous. The world-class researchers teaching my classes were usually very good teachers as well. There weren't that many specific requirements, so there was a lot of space to take free electives. I was able to take a couple graduate level courses and they were extremely fascinating (and of course very difficult). Someone like this would thrive because the main bottleneck in many of these classes was still programming aptitude and debugging skill. Many (most?) students have no experience programming before coming to university.
If someone is a poor adult, schools stop considering your parent's finances once you're 24, so financial aid at top universities can also be quite generous in these situations.
As with other subjects in this realm, I find the support a little over hyped and occasionally disingenuous.
Based on both my own experience and the collective anecdotes it’s they’re a gamble. I’ve heard stories of great CC’s inferring interesting programs with better teaching. On the other hand I’ve both heard and seen schools that are basically just a worse version of the flail high school, with uselessly superficial courses taught by people who don’t seem to know what they’re doing. IMO they tend to shine in two places.
1) training for skilled labor. I’ve seen lots of good programs, usually with ties to local manufacturers or industry that create a pipeline for needed skilled labor. This could be trades, medical stuff, etc. The starting income for some of these aren’t too bad for a single individual, though I question how far someone can get long term.
2) Transfers, particularly when the schools have agreements guaranteeing acceptance. Depending on a number of other factors, this can be dirt cheap as well.
This mostly mirrors my experience. As a bit of advice, don't bother with your community college's CS program. Start with the math. Calculus is the great filter for STEM degrees. Either you can pass it or you can't, and there's really no use in taking CS courses until you do. Even the most permissive BA CS programs still require it.
Reminds me of a conversation with a counselor when I attended a California Community College. I was expressing how nervous I was to transfer to UC, that I was just some dumb kid from Modesto Junior College. UC had some of the smartest kids around; there's no way I was gonna be able to keep up. He said, "Yeah, there's a lot of really smart kids at UC. But mostly you're gonna find a lot of rich kids. You'll do fine." He was absolutely correct.
I used to care about the school and tier of school. But now none of that matters.
Its "Ivy League (+Stanford, +MIT)" or "anything that checks a box" or nothing. The last being the reality for programmers and a handful of other "professional" trades (a federal labor distinction, not me), unless you are not comfortable being ignored by 10x more recruiters than a degreed person is.
Community college firmly fits in the "anything that checks a box" middle just as much as a coveted state school would. Anytown USA Community College is the same as USC or whatever you happen to covet. One gets you cheap credits and some experience and maybe associates degree, the other gets you more expensive credits up to a bachelor's degree.
The associates degree can be a cheap way to get half of a bachelor's degree, since it will transfer as a prerequisite.
Just do the thing and move on. Or don't. Or go to Ivy League and schools on par with that, if its an option for you.
But yeah, I can't knock community colleges. Also, when I was in school (and dissing community colleges) I had no idea that community colleges are full of attractive visa holders, who are checking their own box. Many of them are nannies who were pre-selected by both the agency, and again by the husband/wife duo (and maybe not with equal weight in decision making process) before you ever get a chance to meet them, super not random in attractiveness. Now I know that. Don't overlook them, the community colleges that is. Given all the status chasers and min/max optimizers here, I feel like someone would need to know this.
My daughter is finishing her second year of community college and just got accepted to all the schools in the University of California system, including UCLA and Berkeley. And California paid her to go to community college. Community college, at least in California, is a great deal. 10/10 would do again.
Community colleges are just better than elite colleges.
Like comparing art classes, I made much better art at community college. And they weren't consummate cheaters.
I wish I saw the other students again, I should have given them twice as much weight as Stanford. But there were some classes at Stanford that were good. But an education can be taken away from you trivially.
Because an education can be taken away in the blink of an eye, without any way of defending yourself or asserting your rights under literally any possible circumstances, why the fuck would I get one? Fucking Brooklyn Bridge.
This spoke to me a lot as someone entering their senior year at a liberal arts school's CS program, especially the lack of CS "fundamentals" stuff. I trust my ability to self-teach and make a decent career out of software, but when the web dev class is pushing JQuery in 2021 it's not weird to be a bit nervous. I'm genuinely nervous for some of our less go-getter graduates. Anyone else from similar backgrounds have schooling and career stories?
Schools being way behind the curve in terms of languages and frameworks is definitely not new, though I'm not a recent grad.
Some quick googling turned up that an outdated web dev class is in at least one top tier school too: https://gt-student-wiki.org/mediawiki/index.php/CS_2803_DWD the syllabus here includes jQuery and PHP both, neither of which are high on many people's "new 2022 project choices" list - "This topic list is accurate as of Spring 2022's CS 2803 DWD course, taught by Ronnie Howard."
This is not something I'd expect a school of any sort to be great at since it's very fast-moving and it's hard to have really great expertise without working on big projects that you won't necessarily have in an academic context.
EDIT: only leaving in the up to date link, not the ancient reddit discussion
I went to Georgia Tech 2016-2020. CS 2803, 4803, and 8803 are all codes for special topics courses that haven't been standardized or established, so the class you linked is pretty obscure. The reddit thread you linked is 9 years old. I think the heavy emphasis on OOP in the GaTech CS intro sequence is the most outdated bit, with the worst offender being the "Objects and Design" course with lectures involving a dated and useless picture of enterprise Java design and a group project involving either programming an Android app or a JavaFX app: https://gt-student-wiki.org/mediawiki/index.php/CS_2340
Whoops, I could've sworn something on there said "May 3", my mistake. Guess it's just the Wiki, not the Reddit thread, that was relevant.
GT circa 2001 had an intro OO course that was "use classes to model airlines and seats for reservations in Java" that was... dated... even for then, sounds like not a ton changed very rapidly. ;)
Hey jQuery is still used a lot, still developed, still updated. And besides, if you can manage to learn that, you can manage to switch it up to vanilla js if you have to, or pick up other stuff.
You're lucky you even had a web dev course. When I went there wasn't anything related to that. Your choices were C, Visual Basic, and/or Java. And I don't think any of the professors had even heard of source control. This was in the 2000s, after the dot-com boom, so it's not like the internet was something new.
But classes were all focused on academic stuff, nothing pragmatic or realistic. For one of my exercises I asked the professor how to hook in and validate the input, and he said "Oh, we don't cover that. That's higher-level 3rd or 4th year stuff. It's ok if your program just crashes if given invalid data."
I had learned the importance of validating input very early on in teaching myself GW-BASIC and Turbo Pascal several years before college. But in the academic world, that was just considered a trivial detail, not important. You could get a degree without ever even learning to validate input.
Which explains a lot about the state of modern software.
That's not really a mark against your school's curriculum. Web frameworks are still changing really fast. No university or community college is going to keep up.
I did some web dev give years ago and I already feel pretty out of the loop with the latest popular trends/frameworks in web dev.
I don't really consider it a negative in terms of employability either. The companies that are looking to hire new grads are not going to be testing you on the latest frameworks.
What makes you think that liberal arts colleges structurally lack a rigorous CS program? Did you go to such a program?
If anything, the smaller class sizes, generally affluent student body, and focus on seminar vs lecture make it just as rigorous if not more so in many ways.
The key to community college is to treat every instructor as a future co-worker. Impress them from day one with a professional attitude, do your work on time and when you are done you now know perhaps a dozen local people in your field.
You can definitely have the college experience going to cc. unless we have different definitions of it. i had no shortage of parties, drugs, bars, awkward socialness, growing as a person and ability to try new things.
You can, but the level of ease greatly depends on which CC. For example, at mine, it was a sleepy bedroom suburb with no young person bars for 30 miles. Almost everyone there is living at home and thus the natural tendency for social gatherings to occur is much tougher than something like Boston or NYC.
It's great to hear that decent institutions still teach the real bread and butter of programming: C#, Java, ASP.NET, UML, OO, and Agile project management. A very select few need to spend 4 years at $50k per annum with their heads in the clouds learning about compiler theory, OS theory, and esoteric programming languages like Lisp and ML. For most, it's better to study all that by yourself using copious free resources like blog posts on Medium.com.
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."