My experience at community college

Community colleges are drastically under-rated I think. We&#x27;ve ended up in a weird situation where inexpensive teaching-first institutions (Universities are really better set up for generating research) have, essentially, no prestige for some reason. But it is 2022, we don&#x27;t have to become computer scientists and invent new theories to program the dang things. Programming-as-a-trade is a niche that needs to be filled, and a place that&#x27;ll let you bang out a degree in a couple years, focused on practical stuff, ought to be... if not the default path, at least a significant one.<p>And besides, at least the community colleges in my region feed into the big local university. Why do people want to pay world-renown researchers to teach them programming 101? It is like having Stephen King teach introductory grammar -- there just isn&#x27;t that much enlightenment that can be packed into &quot;the syntax of if statements.&quot;

One of the biggest drawbacks in the community college experience is the cohort. Not that it&#x27;s any better at a lot of universities either, but the one thing I learnt the most from in college was my peers. Some of the problems like poor course structure, aged curriculum, lack of effort from professors, repetition etc. exists even in top tier universities like Stanford or Berkeley. However, you get some of the smartest minds as your peers, TAs, dates or roommates. Not only do you learn through them in classes, homeworks, project groups etc., but a lot of them go out and work as interns in some of the biggest names in tech. They bring so much knowledge and exposure with them, you benefit from even the smallest of the interactions.<p>The only reason I learnt about git and aliasing commands in shell was because I was sitting next to this kid who did his internship at a cool tech company after their freshman year.

I went to Community College of Rhode Island (00 - 05) and I enjoyed it quite a bit and felt, while I had some weird and unnecessary courses, I actually learned quite a bit. I recommend community college of those who can&#x27;t get a traditional university education for financial, family obligations, or other reasons.<p>In 98, I started working for an internet company (right, when the internet was becoming commonplace), and in 2000, graduated from high school. I was admitted to the University of Rhode Island and didn&#x27;t like it at all -- I was commuter and spent most of the time I wasn&#x27;t at school at my job. I dropped out 3 days into my second semester.<p>I worked for several years at that company full-time going to night school 3-4 nights a week; I went on to become a junior developer at Berklee College of Music (building their online music school), promoted to senior, and then a manager of team there. Once I graduated from CCRI, I moved to Northeastern University and did the online program, which was quite new in 2006, and then to finish my final requirements, took them at night after I worked my 9-5 at Berklee. I&#x27;m now a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University -- a top-tier research university working on resilience engineering; I&#x27;m proposing this year and hoping to defend about 1.5 years from now.<p>I had to take a lot of weird course during my CCRI experience. I had to take introduction to computers in 00: the professor actually gave a quiz at the start of class each week and I would show up late because I worked a real job. I failed the first semester: one of the quizzes was on using the mouse. I also took introduction to the internet. However, I basically got an immediate A because the university bought internet access through my company and I was the contact. I had to take classes on Microsoft Excel, Word, Access, etc. I passed them. This is peak 2000.<p>By far, the most important classes I ever took were the following:<p>- Intro, Intermediate, Advanced C# programming. I never did C# programming before, .NET was <i>VERY NEW</i> and I we wrote a few desktop programs. The professor was hard; I got an A for building a CIDR subnet calculator, which no one understood because... hey, it was 2001. I didn&#x27;t touch .NET until I got a research internship position at Microsoft Research in Redmond where I had to program C# and somewhat knew what I was doing.<p>- Advanced Databases. While I had to build everything in Microsoft Access, my professor made our project group go to another organization in the university, interview them about their problems, and build a database and form interface for interacting with it based on our interviews. This was the <i>most real software engineering course</i> I ever took, until I taught CMU-313, which is designed that way. Let me emphasize the time difference here: that course I took at CCRI was in 2002&#x2F;3 and I taught CMU-313 in 2021. We need more of that style of course.<p>All in all -- do community college if that&#x27;s what you have access to, work hard, work with your professors, and it will (hopefully) not be a limiting factor.

I am forever thankful for California community colleges. I did not the best high school slacked off mostly c&#x27;s doing the bare minimum. Went to local community college loved it took so many amazing classes with great teacher. I transferred to uc Davis with admissions under contract if hekd certain gpa. Cost me about 4k for two year in fees and books. At uc Davis for 2 years 30k. I learned more at my community college than a pretty decent public research college. Still uc Davis was worth it worked as student employee doing computer support. Turned that into full time job at the college as computer programmer and then gotA e jobs making way more doing the same thing. Never got CS degree just got chance to some cool things I had no business doing. All thanks to community college

My wife went to a CC before going to a 4-year university. The challenge of studying in a CC, at least to some students, is that CC&#x27;s courses are not rigorous enough. The courses are on par with those AP courses. For instance, their Calculus class focused on derivatives and integrations, while spending far less time discussing fundamentals like definition of limits, convergent functions, series, or boundary conditions in differential equations. Needless to say, they touched little on proofs, either. Their linear algebra class focuses more on matrix calculation than properties of vector space. Similarly, there were few proofs in their Discrete Maths course, little discussion on computational complexity or computability in algorithms class, no comprehensive projects on data structures like balanced trees, or graph algorithms beyond simple search.<p>These are not inherent problems with CC, but lacking rigorous course does impose a challenge to the students who aspire to be transferred to a 4-year college to study STEM, as they often felt insufficiently equipped to take more advanced courses in universities.

As a poor kid in WV, where I&#x27;d be the first in my family to attend college, I had no idea how any of this worked, so when the DeVry salesman showed up at my school and got pointed to me (I was self taught on computers, writing rudimentary programs, and I made a web page for the marching band, which got me in the school newspaper (it was 1998)), I was a sucker for the spiel. He glanced at my torn-open computer case, hard-wired into a cabinet stereo, with printouts on the wall, and told me that I belonged at DeVry, where I&#x27;d be surrounded by people like myself, and I bought it hook, line, and sinker.<p>I went to DeVry Columbus, and it took me a couple of semesters before I figured out the scam. Expose the students to as many languages as possible; give them an incredibly wide array of the shallowest experiences, so that when they graduated, they could say to potential employers, &quot;yes, I&#x27;ve had experience with that&quot;.<p>Had I finished, I would have taken courses in Visual Basic, C, C++, Java, and Cobol. I would have had zero (0) classes on algorithms or data structures. No discrete math. I quit in my third semester when we had spent our 4th or 5th week fine-tuning printf output for an ATM simulator.<p>I had a tech support job at a call center farm when I left, so I just kept on with that. Used it to get another tech support job at a mom and pop ISP. I was made a sysadmin there, and eventually left to be a sysadmin at a fintech startup because they happened to use the same distro I did (Slackware, weirdly enough). Left there, and through my network of connections, got a job at Northeastern University in Boston, even though I still didn&#x27;t have a degree (that took some negotiating on my and my boss&#x27;s part). Stayed there for a few years and loved it, but got an interview at a private aerospace firm in 2015, and got hired there as an IT Systems Administrator, again, without a degree. After 4 years, they promoted me to IT Systems Engineer, and then to Senior, then to Lead. Now I help run one of the coolest ISPs in the world.<p>I&#x27;m very very fortunate that I&#x27;ve spent my career trying extremely hard to get better at whatever it was that I was doing at the time. I really wish I had made a better choice of college early on, because I feel like I could have ended up where I am faster, and be better at it than I am, but I&#x27;m grateful I&#x27;ve had the chances I have, and the help where I&#x27;ve gotten it. But it hasn&#x27;t been easy, and a better college could have made a big difference.

<i>&gt;Employability was their biggest concern.</i><p>Yes, community colleges often have better pipelines into jobs than 4-year schools. Not always, and not for all programs, but for programs where you&#x27;re learning a trade--usually an AAS degree-- it&#x27;s common. Though unfortunately AAS degrees usually have fewer courses that can be applied to a 4-year degree down the road. It&#x27;s a trade off: less expensive &amp; faster path to employability vs. longer term career growth. If you find yourself needing&#x2F;wanting the full degree later on then on average you&#x27;ll end up taking more coursework than if you started on a 4 year track.<p>Anyway, community colleges are highly underrated for this. Lots of people go to 4 year schools out of inertia, not knowing what they want to do and not particularly motivated by anything except social pressure. Much better to figure things out during a relatively inexpensive year or two at a community college in that case. If nothing clicks for you, track into a trades program you can live with to pay the bills. If something clicks, you can be do the same with it, or transfer the work done so far into a 4 year school to finish off.

&gt; All I can really say is the people who think community college is just as good as university are wrong – but so are the people who say it’s worse. There’s not really a comparison, because they’re different in what they set out to do. It’s just a shame that people suited more for one than the other are encouraged or forced to go down the wrong path for them.<p>Interesting that the author completely misses that the criticism is 100% about social class. Vocational school and community college are seen as bad or low quality because they don’t give their graduates the habitus of the middle class, the same way elite colleges are seen as excellent because far more reliably than directional state u they acculturate their graduates to the professional managerial class.

Here in California, if you spend two years in a CC and get decent grades you’re guaranteed a place in a UC. That’s much better odds than just applying directly.<p>I’ve hired a few people who took this path and every one has been outstanding. Unfortunately people mostly seem mbarassed to admit they did this.

One general advantage of community colleges is that the instructors often have closer ties to industry (and more industry experience) then you might find in many four-year colleges. This means you&#x27;ll hear about things like devops pipelines that might be ignored in more academic settings. There also might be more courses like networking from the ground up, including skills like building the physical layer of a network, i.e. switches, cabling, etc. It&#x27;s often a lot more practical than the academic world. This really fills the need for things like two-year vocational programming programs aimed at going right into the job market.<p>There&#x27;s also a good argument for the four-year college bound that general ed courses at a university are a huge waste of money. Completing such requirements at a CC is often a better experience than sitting in huge auditoriums with several hundered other students in terms of getting one-on-one help. However, advanced courses at four-year research universities offer opportunities that CCs can&#x27;t match, like working with cutting-edge technology or doing internships&#x2F;work-study with real research groups.<p>Where some CCs kind of flail about is when they get into internal conflicts over whether they want to (1) pipeline high school students to four-year universities by meeting gen ed requirements, or (2) serve as a vocational program&#x2F; continuing education for older second-career students or those not headed for a four-year college. It seems possible to do both... but they often have funding problems.

The thing about gamer-attracted high school entrants and attrition is a problem worldwide, not just community college in the US.<p>We do a terrible of job of helping kids to work out whats a good study plan, and the belief &quot;turn your hobby into your jobbie&quot; is sometimes really toxic. Very few kids realize they might be a good fit in Orthodontics (aside from money) or Pathology, or even Argon-gas welding. We don&#x27;t know how to work out how aptitude and interest and drive intersect here, beyond the trivial.<p>I think a bit about this because I went to a UK redbrick 40+ years ago to do joint ecology computing and came out with an average computing single honours, and never lacked for work but I continue to wonder why I washed out of ecology, the friends I kept who remained on that course had fantastic impact in the world, in ways I respect immensely. I had worked for a year in a marine biology lab before entry, nothing on that course was foreign to me: I just did too much dope and didn&#x27;t work hard, not uncommon for a 20 year old.<p>Maybe they &quot;weeded me out&quot; early too?

Oddly enough, I think someone like the author (self-taught background but perhaps lacking fundamentals), would <i>thrive</i> at a top computer science university. Of course, the difficulty is getting in.<p>My experience at Berkeley is that all of the topic specific classes were very well taught and rigorous. The world-class researchers teaching my classes were usually very good teachers as well. There weren&#x27;t that many specific requirements, so there was a lot of space to take free electives. I was able to take a couple graduate level courses and they were extremely fascinating (and of course very difficult). Someone like this would thrive because the main bottleneck in many of these classes was still programming aptitude and debugging skill. Many (most?) students have no experience programming before coming to university.<p>If someone is a poor adult, schools stop considering your parent&#x27;s finances once you&#x27;re 24, so financial aid at top universities can also be quite generous in these situations.

As with other subjects in this realm, I find the support a little over hyped and occasionally disingenuous.<p>Based on both my own experience and the collective anecdotes it’s they’re a gamble. I’ve heard stories of great CC’s inferring interesting programs with better teaching. On the other hand I’ve both heard and seen schools that are basically just a worse version of the flail high school, with uselessly superficial courses taught by people who don’t seem to know what they’re doing. IMO they tend to shine in two places.<p>1) training for skilled labor. I’ve seen lots of good programs, usually with ties to local manufacturers or industry that create a pipeline for needed skilled labor. This could be trades, medical stuff, etc. The starting income for some of these aren’t too bad for a single individual, though I question how far someone can get long term.<p>2) Transfers, particularly when the schools have agreements guaranteeing acceptance. Depending on a number of other factors, this can be dirt cheap as well.

This mostly mirrors my experience. As a bit of advice, don&#x27;t bother with your community college&#x27;s CS program. Start with the math. Calculus is the great filter for STEM degrees. Either you can pass it or you can&#x27;t, and there&#x27;s really no use in taking CS courses until you do. Even the most permissive BA CS programs still require it.

Reminds me of a conversation with a counselor when I attended a California Community College. I was expressing how nervous I was to transfer to UC, that I was just some dumb kid from Modesto Junior College. UC had some of the smartest kids around; there&#x27;s no way I was gonna be able to keep up. He said, &quot;Yeah, there&#x27;s a lot of really smart kids at UC. But mostly you&#x27;re gonna find a lot of rich kids. You&#x27;ll do fine.&quot; He was absolutely correct.

I used to care about the school and tier of school. But now none of that matters.<p>Its &quot;Ivy League (+Stanford, +MIT)&quot; or &quot;<i>anything that checks a box</i>&quot; or <i>nothing</i>. The last being the reality for programmers and a handful of other &quot;professional&quot; trades (a federal labor distinction, not me), unless you are not comfortable being ignored by 10x more recruiters than a degreed person is.<p>Community college firmly fits in the &quot;anything that checks a box&quot; middle just as much as a coveted <i>state</i> school would. Anytown USA Community College is the same as USC or whatever you happen to covet. One gets you cheap credits and some experience and maybe associates degree, the other gets you more expensive credits up to a bachelor&#x27;s degree.<p>The associates degree can be a cheap way to get half of a bachelor&#x27;s degree, since it will transfer as a prerequisite.<p>Just do the thing and move on. Or don&#x27;t. Or go to Ivy League and schools on par with that, if its an option for you.<p>But yeah, I can&#x27;t knock community colleges. Also, when I was in school (and dissing community colleges) I had no idea that community colleges are full of attractive visa holders, who are checking their own box. Many of them are nannies who were pre-selected by both the agency, and again by the husband&#x2F;wife duo (and maybe not with equal weight in decision making process) before you ever get a chance to meet them, super not random in attractiveness. Now I know that. Don&#x27;t overlook them, the community colleges that is. Given all the status chasers and min&#x2F;max optimizers here, I feel like someone would need to know this.

My daughter is finishing her second year of community college and just got accepted to all the schools in the University of California system, including UCLA and Berkeley. And California <i>paid</i> her to go to community college. Community college, at least in California, is a great deal. 10&#x2F;10 would do again.

Community colleges are just better than elite colleges.<p>Like comparing art classes, I made much better art at community college. And they weren&#x27;t consummate cheaters.<p>I wish I saw the other students again, I should have given them twice as much weight as Stanford. But there were some classes at Stanford that were good. But an education can be taken away from you trivially.<p>Because an education can be taken away in the blink of an eye, without any way of defending yourself or asserting your rights under literally any possible circumstances, why the fuck would I get one? Fucking Brooklyn Bridge.

This spoke to me a lot as someone entering their senior year at a liberal arts school&#x27;s CS program, especially the lack of CS &quot;fundamentals&quot; stuff. I trust my ability to self-teach and make a decent career out of software, but when the web dev class is pushing JQuery in 2021 it&#x27;s not weird to be a bit nervous. I&#x27;m genuinely nervous for some of our less go-getter graduates. Anyone else from similar backgrounds have schooling and career stories?

I went to a “redneck” tech school (EET course. 2 years, full-time). In my case, it worked out.<p>But I have spent a lifetime, looking up noses…

The key to community college is to treat every instructor as a future co-worker. Impress them from day one with a professional attitude, do your work on time and when you are done you now know perhaps a dozen local people in your field.

My 3 years at a CC costed $6k while my 2 years at a UC was $30k (w&#x2F; rent $40k).<p>Only thing you miss out on is more talented peers and a “college experience” which I tried to make the most of at UC but it’s harder by then.

It&#x27;s great to hear that decent institutions still teach the real bread and butter of programming: C#, Java, ASP.NET, UML, OO, and Agile project management. A very select few need to spend 4 years at $50k per annum with their heads in the clouds learning about compiler theory, OS theory, and esoteric programming languages like Lisp and ML. For most, it&#x27;s better to study all that by yourself using copious free resources like blog posts on Medium.com.