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Comment by gmays | Hacker News Reader

Community college worked well for me. 2 weeks after graduating high school I started taking a heavy workload at the local community college. I was able to complete the prerequisites by the following year and transfer to a local state university. I was lucky that both were within a 45min drive from my house.

The result was graduating college with a bachelor's degree 2.5 years after graduating high school. I lived at home for the the duration (rent free as long as I maintained a 3.5 GPA) so the full cost was only around $6,000.

This was in northern California (Modesto Junior College and Cal State Stanislaus) with a relatively low cost of living. I know the costs have increased since then (I went in the mid 2000's), but I assume it's still relatively affordable.

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I did the CCC path about 6 years ago in Northern California too, but I did 3 years instead of 1. Tuition was free with the BOG Fee Waiver (I think around 50% of CCC students get it).

Not having to worry about financials really helped in reducing the pressure of changing majors. I went from CS to Mfg Engineering. If I had to factor in an additional $20000 into that, I probably would be working in a job I disliked rather than exploring other options.

On top of going to school for free, and living rent free, I was able to have a job for a few years which basically paid for my expenses in a 4-year.

Hardest part of it all was convincing my parents that I didn't want to go to Berkley even though I was accepted, but would rather go to a CC. The stigma behind CCs was the only hurdle.

All in all, got free school, had a savings, and knew what I wanted to do for a career. Would recommend it to anyone. PLUS I got to have my mom's cooking for lunch and dinner.

I'm wondering what's the opportunity cost that you paid by having Cal State on your CV instead of a top-ranked university. I sometimes see people who went to MIT or Stanford that I feel would not have gotten nearly as far as they have if it were Cal State. How many of your colleagues are from top universities?

Studies have shown that Calstate LAactually does a better job at promoting social mobility than UCLA.

that doesn't mean degrees from two are equal, or that there wasnt an opportunity cost paid by going to cc. I'm going to speculate that a UCLA degree is better than a calstate degree, but people going to UCLA are already high class, thus making UCLA lower mobility than calstate (cant move up when you're already at the top).

I was able to find this site that compares average income by where students went to college.

CSU Stanislaus: $47,000 (early career), $90,300 (mid career) MIT: $81,500 (early career), $147,000 (mid career)

Early career is 0-5 years experience. Mid career is 10+ years experience.

https://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report/bachelors?pag...

Obviously, we can't say that prestige of college and income are causal but the correlation is definitely there.

In order to establish some degree of causality we would have to look only at the population of students accepted to both schools. That way you're starting from a comparable baseline.

Also you'd have to control for major. MIT produces a lot of people working in technical fields with a higher average income. Cal State awards a broader range of degrees.

Here is one only for computer science. https://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report/best-schools-...

Meh, I’m making more at mid career than the equivalent MIT grad, and I went to a flyover state university. Don’t sweat it. Just get good at what you like to do and the money will come naturally.

> I'm wondering what's the opportunity cost that you paid by having Cal State on your CV instead of a top-ranked university. I sometimes see people who went to MIT or Stanford that I feel would not have gotten nearly as far as they have if it were Cal State. How many of your colleagues are from top universities?

Community college is different from a state college. Community colleges only do your first two years,and you transfer to another school for the rest of your Bachelors.

This is what I'm looking at now... I really want to get into a top-10 school, but I'm a washout; I had terrible high school grades and I've only been published once in the meanwhile. A top-10 university won't let me in. Hell, I talked to the people at SJSU and they told me to take two years of community college and get back to them.

It's interesting, though; I looked into it, and it's dramatically easier to get into Berkely from a community college; Berkeley has like a 15% admissions rate out of high school... and a 25% admissions rate from a California community college.

(that said, I personally agree that a top-10 college is worlds better than a middle of the pack college. My only point here is that from my research? Even without any money constraints, the most realistic path for me to a top-10 college is through a community college.

Of course, if you have a chance to go to a top-10 college, my advice to you is to borrow like hell and do it, because top-10 colleges, as far as I can tell, give you dramatically better returns if you graduate, and they don't seem to cost dramatically more than the mid-range schools.

I personally think that the utility drops off pretty fast after you get out of the really top universities. I mean,I'm not saying it's not worth going to a middle of the road school... I'm just saying that I would be a lot more careful of taking out giant loans to go to a middle of the road school than I would when going to a top-10 school.)

> because top-10 colleges, as far as I can tell, give you dramatically better returns if you graduate

That is probably dependent upon major and level.

I suspect that for engineering, for example, a "mid-tier" school probably is better for your average undergrad. I never saw the 400+ student lectures that are universally lousy at a mid-tier (20-50) university. You also got professors teaching classes at far lower levels (my Electronics 101 and Signals and Systems were taught by the Dean, himself)

This may be unique to engineering given that engineering schools actually have to answer to an accreditation body (ABET).

I've got no opinion of the quality of instruction; I don't have the experience of either one.

All I'm saying is that most people didn't go to an elite school, and yet a lot of the really prestigious and remunerative Engineering and engineering/management positions from 2-4 levels up from me are occupied by graduates of elite schools. The higher up you go, it seems, the higher proportion of them went to an elite school.

I mean, that's totally unscientific, and just my perception, but if we could correlate the school you graduated from with people employed at the top-tier Engineering shops in the bay area, I bet elite schools would be vastly over-represented.

Mostly bias, I suspect.

If you polled management from Westinghouse in the 1990's, you would find Pitt, CMU, Penn State and OSU overrepresented.

One thing you have to be careful of is that "elite" school graduates often have an over-inflated sense of how good they actually are. The ex-CTO of ModCloth had a video talking to a bunch of Russians where he talked about how the Pittsburgh team was better and more productive and that the SFO team was unjustifiably arrogant.

The guy was Adil Wali. Man, it took me way too long to find this. I guess ModCloth PR has sanitized the web: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4qYFqpLQBc#t=1h20m

>Mostly bias, I suspect.

If bias gets you a significantly more remunerative or prestigious job, well, that should be factored into your return on investment, if you are looking for renumeration or prestige or to work around people with prestige.

>One thing you have to be careful of is that "elite" school graduates often have an over-inflated sense of how good they actually are.

My experience of the world is that having an over-inflated sense of your own worth doesn't hurt you any.

It's sad, because I personally find that kind of overconfidence super annoying, but if you are trying to maximize your career...

I did a similar thing in Texas (Austin Community College -> Texas State University), albeit later in life. I'm on a 4-person engineering team where the other three when to Carnegie Mellon, Stanford and Princeton.

I guess I worked at a moderately "prestigious" consultancy for a while that is a large factor in me having this particular job, but it seems like top universities aren't all that important beyond your first few years in the industry.

This is a great plan and what I personally did 10 years ago. Some states also have high school programs, like A+, upon completion of which your college experience becomes tuition-free as long as your GPA stays above a certain point average in college.

CC is great and it’s awesome people find it so valuable but an equally important topic to explore is why college is not longer affordable for large parts of the population in the US.

After moving to California six years ago, I was surprised to learn how many high school students have this plan -- a couple of years at a local community college and a transfer to one of the bigger Cal schools.

It's a good strategy for many. My community college let me take basic calc based physics with a small class of 20 pre-engineering majors. After transferring to a big engineering school I met my wife. She took the exact same class but it now had 400 people and zero time with the professor. Also now it didn't use calculus.

Iirc it was phys2210

Community college worked so well for you... but you had to transfer and go to a university instead?

Colleges are only 2 years tops, and some offer transfer programs to universities. The one nearby me in Florida: Valencia College actually gets you a guaranteed transfer to any University in the state practically. So you're more likely to be accepted in a university by going the College route first. Also in some cases you can take a lot of the math classes for a lot cheaper and they're still transferable as a result.

Good question. I can't speak for all community college in all states, but community colleges are generally considered "two-year" institutions.

This means they can only award associate and technical degrees, but not bachelor's (4-year) degrees. You need to transfer to a 4-year college for that, which is what I did.

Community colleges do not offer bachelor's degrees. They only offer associate's degrees, which are a 2 year program, and do not confer the same expected income potential as a bachelor's degree. That's what this article is about; do two years at a community college to get the GE classes out of the way, and then transfer to a four year university to get your degree. It's actually extremely common; it's what I did, and I only spent about $15k to get my bachelor's in computer science.

However, it's important to ensure that your intended university has an articulation agreement with whichever community college you're attending. In California, the IGETC certificates are accepted by all University of California and California State University campuses, and the CSU-GE Breadth certificates are accepted by all California State University campuses, but not UC campuses.

Oddly enough, my local community college was just approved to start offering two bachelors programs: https://www.wwcc.edu. I've seen this happen a few places, though admittedly it is somewhat rare and is a rule-bender in terms of the normal way we define community colleges. I'm also not that clear on why, as there are 4-year programs available from other public institutions a one-hour and two-hour drive away (IE: there isn't really a shortage)

Many Washington state community colleges in the Seattle area are being rebranded as colleges and are starting to offer bachelor degrees (BCC => Bellevue College, Seattle Central Community College => Seattle Central College). Not sure if that is being applied to Eastern Washington as well, but it makes sense. See: http://www.heraldnet.com/news/two-year-colleges-trending-awa...

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