<p>JHS, that conclusion isn’t very surprising.</p>
<p>When you’re open-enrollment, cheap and have little or no admissions standards, some of what you get are students who don’t have the aptitude or the interest for higher education. Those students might say they intend to transfer on the application, but they quickly find they’re not really ready or willing to put in the work that it takes to get a degree. They drop out or flunk out, and it looks bad on the statistics.</p>
<p>What I find more compelling are the studies of students who transfer from California community colleges to the UC system. They perform equally well academically as incoming freshmen and graduate at roughly the same rate - more than two-thirds get their degree within three years of transferring.</p>
<p>That shows that students who put in the work to transfer from a community college enter UC junior and senior-level classes with more or less the same level of preparation and academic ability as students who did their lower-division studies on the UC campus.</p>
<p>Which brings up a final point: You do have to be somewhat self-directed at a community college. Nobody will hold your hand like at a small private LAC. Many students are adults coming back to school, taking night classes, motivated to improve their lives and professors focus their energy on the ones who clearly want to learn. Slackers just get ignored.</p>
<p>The best professor I ever had, and probably ever will have, was the journalism department chairman at my community college alma mater.</p>