@badgolfer You seem to have a rather skewed and biased idea of this subject. There are certainly plenty of CC students that are less than stellar academically. Many did poorly in high school and ended up at a CC as a result. However, there are plenty of university students that did poorly in high school as well. Many of them are still lazy and constantly procrastinating.
There are also plenty of CC students that did excellent in high school, and have chosen to stay at a CC for a couple years to save money, take care of family obligations, etc. It’s not the last resort for horrible students that you seem to be making it out to be. I myself am an academically excellent CC student, and I know plenty of other CC students that are academically excellent as well.
Many CC students start out intending to get a bachelor’s degree, and a small percentage of them actually complete it. However, this isn’t always because “they failed to complete it.” It’s often because of outside circumstances preventing them from completing it. If someone starts school at 30 and intends to complete a bachelor’s, there are many obstacles that could arise. If someones spouse falls ill and has to stop working…what do they do? The bills have to be paid. This often ends up with them dropping out of school to work more…because they don’t really have a choice. Many students complete their AA and have to take a break from school to go to work for a while, and fully intend to go back in a couple of years to complete their bachelor’s. Many of them fall into a comfortable job and end up not having the time to complete their bachelor’s. There are countless reasons for this. The typical age of a CC student is higher than the typical age of a university student. This alone makes a huge difference.
I’d like to see some of those statistics broken down by age group. For example,
x% of incoming CC students in 18-22 age group said they intended to complete a bachelor’s
Of that number, y% completed a bachelors
Then the same statistics for the 22-30 group, 30-40 group, etc.
I’d be willing to bet that we’d see a trend. A greater percentage of the students in the 18-22 age group would actually complete a bachelor’s, and the likelihood of completing it would decrease with age. That is of course just speculation though.
You seem to have a very specific image in your head of the typical community college student, and I can assure that in my own experience it is absolutely wrong. Perhaps my CC is simply very different from the ones that you’ve encountered.