I live in the Los Angeles area and I’m torn between two colleges. One of them is Santa Monica college and the other is Los Angeles Southwest college. I hear very great reviews from SMC but I live like 15 minutes down the road from LA southwest. Does the community college really affect me when I prepare to transfer. My dream school is UCLA and I want to have the highest possible chance to get in a couple years down from now.
If you check the following link for transfers by community college, you will see Santa Monica college had 1984 applicants to UCLA for 2016-2017 with 663 admits for an acceptance rate of 33%. For LA Southwest college, there was 46 applicants with 9 admits for an acceptance rate of 20%.
https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/admissions-source-school