Fact is, there are thousands of universities that are wonderful and not Ivies.
If you need things that are plain spoken: you’re not going to an Ivy from a CC, regardless of whether you start in Spring or Fall.
What they mean by 2 years is 4 semesters of 15-16 credits but the assumption is that you’re trying to transfer from a 4-year college, typically highly ranked but not offering a specific subject (ie., you want to major in Sanskrit) or have taken all the advanced classes offered in … at your highly ranked college and/or are working on a cross-college research project already involving a professor at that Ivy, who told you to apply so you could join his/her team.
In all other cases, they’ll look at your application for graduate school, not for college. They want their students to start as freshmen.
For UCs etc, you could start in January and take 13-14 credits, and complete your 60 credits over 3 semesters.
You wouldn’t necessarily graduate, since you would be taking classes with the goal of completing gen eds and pre-reqs - those may match a “transfer AA” but may not, and it doesn’t matter.