<p>I think if more CC’s had on-campus housing the attraction would be even greater for more students. Maybe that would be one way for CC’s to attract more students. The cost would still be less than a 4 year school but an option for those that don’t want to live at home yet need a less expensive option.</p>
<p>I know of a student who successfully transferred to Stanford after finishing at a local CC.</p>
<p>I worked in the SUNY system in the early 80s. At that time, students who graduated from a two-year school were guaranteed admission to a four-year school as a junior. It did not include any school or any program, but a school with full credit for the associate’s degree. That still is not true for all CCs in this state. There are some agreements in place, but there is lots of room for improvement.</p>
<p>Definitely a different county than happy mom.;)</p>
<p>Our local CCs, despite good faculty, are entirely remedial. Calc III (Multivariable) isn’t even offered. They would not be a good option for high-achieving high school graduates, regardless of financial need. So this is highly geographically variable.</p>
<p>Sop14’s Mom-that is how I would describe our CC as well. I just looked through the course catalog and couldn’t even find anything outside of “applied Math” as a general ed. They are a great place if you want to go into hotel management, CAD, auto repair, medical assistant, etc. They are not a stepping stone to a 4 year degree for most kids here.</p>
<p>MD Mom</p>
<p>We must not be in the same county too. My county has an agreement with our flagship. In fact, my counties CC has an agreement with all of the State schools. </p>
<p>Dh and I both attended CC before we went to Universities to finish our BS. Dh got a masters. </p>
<p>CC is a viable option to every kid. I would not bat an eye if any of my kids went to our CC. </p>
<p>Now the option is only a good one when you get the foundation to attend an university and I know not all CCs are created equal. Should you have a decent system there is no reason not to use it.</p>
<p>Is there a way to find out how the cc students have actually done at a regular university??? Technically, my cc offers Calc I, II and III. But most of their courses are remedial. If my son takes Calc I and II there for dual credit, will he truly be ready for Calc III at a good university???</p>
<p>choirfarm–if the CC is set up for classes for dual enrollment, good chance the class is fine and the natural stepping stone would be Calc III. I would call the accepting university and ask what the most common placement class is after the dual enrolled math classes or what their recommendation would be for freshman year. If not the admissions people, contact the math department chair at the admitting university (your flagship). Even if your son doesn’t go there, they should be able to give you a good idea of how the class stacks up . By “you calling” I really mean your son should call.</p>
<p>Ok,I’ll have him call. But he is looking at Baylor and TCU not our flagship. According to our cc and the schools websites, they will accept the credits. But I just wonder how he would do in Calc III.</p>
<p>It doesn’t really matter where he is going to apply. The math department at the flagship will be able to give you a good idea of how well they CC classes prepare them for college math. If the flagship math department says that they don’t allow any kids that dual enrolled to take Calc III it will give you a good idea that he probably shouldn’t take it at the college he is attending either. If the flagship math people say that the dual enrolled kids are the best kids in the Calc III classes then he should be ok taking it at Baylor or where ever.</p>
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<p>This is us too. As I said before, my oldest, a current LAC sophomore, said the English 101 he took at our cc in no way compares to that offered at his mid-level LAC. Since he’s not fond of English, he’s happy his credits transferred. Since I prefer an education, I sort of wish we’d had him retake the class.</p>
<p>Middle son will likely be attending a higher level LAC or U and will not transfer his English credits from the same cc even if the school offers it (our state related schools will, UA already told him they will - though I might let him keep credits there I think - and take a different course - thinking as I type). I want middle son to have the higher academics from retaking it elsewhere. English 101 is not the same everywhere and I doubt other classes are either. Undoubtably, some are probably good. I’ve just only experienced the not-so-good. It’s not the faculty in at least some cases. It’s the level of student they have to work with.</p>
<p>I recognize that it’s hard to look at CC statistics because of the vast range of students they serve. But I think I remember a study I saw a couple of years ago purporting to match students who went to CC intending to transfer later to four-year institutions with similar students who went directly from high school to second-tier (or lower) four-year public colleges – similar in terms of high school, high-school GPA, and test scores, maybe other factors, too. Anyway, I remember the conclusions as very sobering – the students who went to CC were much, much less likely to obtain a four-year degree. The 6-year graduation rate was bad enough for the four-year colleges, but much worse for kids who went to the CC intending eventually to get a four-year degree.</p>
<p>Does anyone else remember that? Know where to find it?</p>
<p>I saw some of that in real life. At my last firm, we had an administrative assistant who had gone to the same academic magnet school as my kids. She had chosen the CC route for economic reasons, but had always intended to get a four-year degree. She has been out of high school for over ten years now, and still does not have that four-year degree – and she’s still an administrative assistant. It’s not for lack of intelligence or work capacity. She is smart as a whip, extremely organized, and a hard worker. She got addicted to working and the money it brought in, and then supporting her boyfriend as he finished school, then marriage, then a child . . . . </p>
<p>This is a woman who could be commanding battalions, and she is still at least a year away from a bachelor’s degree. I used to argue that we had a moral responsibility to fire her or cut back her hours to make her finish school, but my ex-partners did not agree. We all knew we were exploiting the heck out of her. The thing is, she felt very successful. Compared to her classmates, she was doing great and making big bucks, and it was easy enough for us to give her strokes and raises that made her feel appreciated. But she would have been much better off – and set her sights much higher – had she been in a context where ambition was more the norm.</p>
<p>Re: #112</p>
<p>If she could not afford to go to a four year school in the first place, then going to a four year school immediately would probably not have put her any closer to a bachelor’s degree than she is now, since she would likely have dropped out for money reasons.</p>
<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>
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<p>That might be a larger context than you (her employer) could ever provide her, though. H and I were just talking about the fact that among his employees (=doctor’s office, most not educated except for the nurses) there just isn’t a cultural expectation that after hs, you strive for a good college experience. Some of his employees, like your friend, are smart-as-a-whip but never had any expectations placed on them that college is where you go after high school. Many of them have gone to the local comm college, and good for them in doing so, but the kind of experience that my kids are having at their elite university / LAC is simply and completely foreign to their way of thinking and how they were brought up.</p>
<p>Re: 113 – true. If money is the problem, and you pay a higher price at a four-year school, it will make matters worse, faster.</p>
<p>This whole dialogue is making it clear to me that when people around the US say “community college” they can mean very different things. My local CC (which is what I’m thinking of when I say “CC”) sends two thirds of its entrants on to four-year schools as transfers. I have heard the complaint that there is too much pressure to transfer, and too much assumption that everybody intends to transfer, when some people are there for other reasons.</p>
<p>I’m sure if you go to our CC and take a certificate program to become a personal trainer in 9 credits, or an AAT degree in landscaping with most of the courses very practical, the professors might approach it differently. But the first two years of liberal arts BA/BS courses are somewhat different.</p>
<p>I looked at the catalog just now, and found that math at our CC goes up through Analytic Geometry and Calculus 1 and 2, then Linear Algebra, Calc 3, and Differential Equations. That should be enough to keep most recent HS grads busy for at least two semesters and save some money in the process.</p>
<p>How rigorous is the actual instruction in those courses, despite what the catalog might suggest? I don’t know. That’s harder to discern. That’s where talking with CC alums in your field, who have since gone on to good four year schools (or the department heads at the applicable flagships) might be most valuable.</p>
<p>I wonder, as colleges and state universities become more prohibitively expensive, and the population who “uses” the community colleges changes, if the results JHS (I recall the study but can’t find it either), won’t change.</p>
<p>I wonder how much a kid’s finishing college has to do with family expectations and support. Around here, everyone finishes college. It doesn’t matter how long it takes. Parent’s are college educated and many of us have graduate degrees, as well, and so the kids just keep plugging away.</p>
<p>Recently, a friends 30 year old son, who’d taken a few twists and turns, finished up his B.S. He’d never seen himself as someone who would not have a degree. </p>
<p>There are a lot of studies, even in the income area, that people generally meet their basic expectations of themselves. And, as the populations change, the results change. College is just very expensive, now. The idea of sending Ambivalent Jr off to college to sink or swim is a bigger financial risk than it once was, and people with a college education are smart enough to “know” this.</p>
<p>Also, I’m surprised those of you with subpar CC’s don’t do something about it. It’s your tax dollars at work. Have you seen how many unemployed PhD’s there are out there?</p>
<p>I guess the perennial question is - how does it affect the kid who is trying to save a few bucks and transfer to a good 4 year (let’s make it a state flagship) if his classmates are the middle-aged mother who wants to take a photography class or the car-rental guy whose boss wants him to take a class in marketing or whatever. I don’t know the answer. That might be dependent on the actual kid and to what extent his learning and motivation is impacted by his peers.</p>
<p>Poetgirl - are you in suburban Chicago? I am (out west) and there is not an insignificant number of kids who go to C.O.D. and then transfer to U of I, primarily driven by parental desires to save money. I’m glad I didn’t have to present that option to my kids, but financially speaking I do understand it, esp for a family with multiple children.</p>
<p>Yes, Pizzagirl, north.</p>
<p>Around here, so many kids go from CLC to UofI and others, because of the articulation agreement, that I would see it as an option for an ambivalent kid, or a kid who hadn’t caught the education bug. But, they do such a good job, from day one, of getting those kids on track, remediating, whatnot.</p>
<p>It’s an impressive thing.</p>
<p>I’ve taught some English classes out there, and there are plenty of kids there who are “finding out” that they are brighter than they knew. Some of them just took longer than others to “figure it out.” I like that they have another shot at it, personally. It’s only good.</p>
<p>I think, though, that we have really good community colleges surrounding Chicago, for some reason.</p>