<p>I'm considering JC as one of my option, but missing out the college experience devastate me. I wants to go to my dream college. What some Pros and Cons of applying to JC colleges? How much do I miss out?</p>
<p>You will miss out A LOT in my opinion</p>
<p>Pros of JC:
cheaper tuition.
You will get a good degree for less when you transfer to a 4 year school</p>
<p>Cons:
Everything else</p>
<p>Yeah, that would suck to go to JC…I mean, you’re still living at home, so the “college experience” isn’t really there at all.</p>
<p>I would say the only pro like Sheed said is cost.</p>
<p>Other than the cost, the other big pro is you are guaranteed entrance. No worry about good enough grades to get in, no huge applications with essays, no stress. All that comes two years later.</p>
<p>You do miss the college experience. Some kids I know go away to community college. (There were half dozen or so that went to Santa Barbara City College for example.) In California there are some community colleges that funnel into certain UCs, and that one funnels into Santa Barbara. The cost savings is much less, as you still have the housing costs. You do still save on tuition. But if you pick the right community college, and keep up your side of the contract (grades, right classes) you pretty much are guaranteed entrance to the associated UC. I suspect there are deals like that in other places. You might want to contact your dream school and ask where most the transfer students come from.</p>
<p>It’s basically 13th and 14th grade, iow, a continuation of high school. Only use it as a $$$ saver to transfer w/ credits to 4 yr school if you want any semblance of the college life.</p>
<p>Community College’s have come a long way. Many have a wide variety of clubs and organizations that you get involved in. The course work can be about as demanding as you want and often is equal to what you are going to get at many of the big name universities. </p>
<p>If you have a CC that you are considering then by all means go for it. If you transfer after CC and later get your BS or BA it will have the same recognition as if you’d attended the later school the entire time. Also, you will be exposed to more diversity if that is important to you.
You are not going to miss out by going to a CC.</p>
<p>bump any more opinions?</p>
<p>I have another question.</p>
<p>Should a CC be totally out of the question if it’s not a very good one? My CC offers next to no foreign language classes, something I’m passionate about. It also doesn’t have enough math to keep me occupied for more than 1 semester. Would it be a waste of two years of my life to go there? I’m considering business school or law school.</p>
<p>**Pros of a CC: **</p>
<ul>
<li>Stay at home</li>
<li>The easiest admissions on Earth, just pass high school and it doenst matter if you have a 1.0 - SATs? ‘what r they!!?’</li>
<li>Cheap tutition, 4 years is about as much as two years at a Public In-State university, so it thus only costs about half the money.</li>
</ul>
<p>**Cons of a CC: **
- The workload will be just as rigorous as most universities, but you will get a lot less recognition for your hardwork. Even though the classes usually are just as hard, most graduate schools and transfer schools will look at a 4.0 from “XYZ Community College” in an infinetely lower standing than a 3.6 from Yale.
- A Pretty crappy college-experience, since most CC’s are underfunded and have lousy administraters - after all, who ‘wants’ to become the president of a community college?
- Always a chance of getting screwed over when trying to transfer.
- Once again, lack of a true great college experience. The enviornment is just too different.
- Being in an enviornment where most people don’t really want to learn (A minority is very strong academically but most are there because they find academics lame)</p>
<p>Overall, I’d personally never want to go to a CC, even if I had to stack myself with loans that I would need to spend 10 years of my post-college life repaying. The College Experience is glorious and the most life-changing you will face - its one of the greatest experiences possible. Of course, being middle class, I have the luxury of being able to say that I want to go to a university. </p>
<p>In short, paying triple the price for a university is the right decision when faced with the idea of going to a community college (If you are in the correct socio-economic strata, of course)</p>
<p>I’d say CCs are a decent investment if you have a good state university in your state.</p>
<p>it’s that mean if i go to community college, I won’t have that much fun and I pretty miss out everything. Education wise, social life, etc.</p>
<p>I guess I have to come down on the other end.</p>
<p>I had a good time at my CC, and I think it was a positive experience overall. Granted, I stayed one year at the CC and 3 years at UCLA, but I did EVERYTHING that everyone defines as the “college experience.”</p>
<p>I lived on-campus, I rushed (and didn’t do anything with it), I did internships, I studied abroad, I joined clubs.</p>
<p>If you are willing to be ambitious and work hard enough for it, transferring can work out splendidly. Not only did I save tons of money, I think I actually improved my overall experience at UCLA by transferring.</p>
<p>Of course, YMMV.</p>
<p>how do you able to stay at jc college for one year and transfer? I thought you had to stay there for two years. Is there any possibilites to transfer after one year?</p>
<p>
Did you do all those at your CC?</p>
<p>bjt223,</p>
<p>TONS OF UNITS. ;)</p>
<p>GoBlue81,</p>
<p>I did all those at UCLA, but it wasn’t like I had to give them up just because I transferred. I just waited a year. :)</p>
<p>That’s what I thought. But if you transfer in your junior year, you wouldn’t be able to do much of the “college experience”.</p>
<p>
Sure, if you are smart and plan ahead, you can transfer to many of the top universities (including OOS and privates) on your own merit. You don’t have to rely on the transfer agreement.</p>
<p>I am saying this from the perspective of being in community college at the moment. I am 19, cynical, and so full of hate you don’t want to know me.</p>
<p>On to the subject: Community college can sometimes offer something more valuable than the “college experience” so many people seem to like. I’ll give a little background to this story…</p>
<p>When I took Anatomy/Physiology in high school, I was a year ahead. Most people in Junior year picked chem, I didn’t. As a result, I was in a class full of seniors whom didn’t care to do their work, despite the “Don’t do all of it, don’t get any grade” rule. Now, save for one or two people, the entirety of the twenty to thirty people in the class going off to their dream college were immature in retrospect. Hell, I didn’t think they were mature when I saw there next to them. Far, far from what I would expect from someone wanting to go off without supervision to ‘learn’.</p>
<p>Now, that doesn’t mean they can’t be successful. That just means I think they are irresponsible, immature children who think they are entitled to not be supervised. Good for them.</p>
<p>I’m currently entering my 4th semester of community college. Time consuming? Yes. But the fact is, for maybe $800 (Likely much less with the tuition refund grant), and the investment of an additional semester worth of my time (Or nights, if you really must know), I will have a degree before I even transfer to my ‘dream college’, which I still don’t know about.</p>
<p>That means I will have a backup plan. For the cost of half of a year, I will have something to fall back on with nearly guaranteed employment (Process Technician, which is only offered at one community college in Northern California). Not to mention the pay isn’t far from that of electrical engineering, and I will have to do another two to three years of school just for that.</p>
<p>So before you go and decide CC isn’t for you, go ahead and browse a course catalog, see if they offer a technical program relevent to what it is you want to study.</p>
<p>Thanks Phelp for your perspective. Still, I wanted to transfer as soon as possible. Like the other post say, if i want a higher education, the graduate school would look at me if I was stupid, because I takes lower class course in JC. As of right now as high school senior, I’m still searching for my identity in life, but I still don’t feel like staying two years of my life in JC college would meant anything to me. I might have to because of my grades, but I wants to obtain the best education as possible.</p>
<p>Also, How do you stay ahead of everyone else? I know you did a lots of units, but I bet there’s something else in it. Unless you really did 60 units in one years.</p>
<p>bjt223,</p>
<p>I know plenty of people who went on to great grad schools (Stanford, Harvard, Berkeley) who also transferred. Going to a CC for a year or two is not a death sentence for your graduate career. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Had some APs, started classes in the summers and nights before I started CC full time, and took 18 units a semester, 6 in the summer, and 4 in the winter.</p>
<p>Even if we just counted the non-AP units, that would have come out to 46. If you have some APs and maybe some courses you can take before you start, you can easily fit in 60.</p>
<p>Community college is in NO WAY a “death sentence” for grad school.</p>
<p>Remember, in California, something like 50 percent of all CSU/UC graduates came through the community college system. If all those students couldn’t get into grad school, our grad schools would be empty.</p>
<p>My dad transferred from LA Valley College to CSU Northridge, got his BA, moved on to UCLA and then Cal, where he got his PhD in paleontology. He’s now teaching at Sacramento State.</p>