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Comment by cguess | Hacker News Reader

A degree says something about the student. I completely understand why universities would not want to accept credits from school below their own qualification level. If they confer a degree to a student that student is representing the university's education quality to everyone that hires them or works with them.

Spending three years at a community college and expecting the credits to transfer to a major university makes no sense for the institution. At that point they did a minority of your training, why would they recommend you?

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I follow your logic, but I really think it's about money since they also put up barriers for testing out of classes.

Usually, a strong state-run community college program lets an Associates degree earned at a community college transfer into any public state university as a Junior. Most non-degree focused classes directly transfer. Going between states (staying in the same regional accreditation) seems to be difficult and not all states are set up like I had described. The theory being that someone who isn't quite ready for university has an opportunity to catch up and in my experience it gives more options when popular prerequisites are full. So the state has a reason to push for this.

I'm also skeptical about universities pointing to their qualification level because I've interviewed graduates from many well known universities and was kind of floored at the basic things many candidates seemed completely unfamiliar with.

Nationally accredited organizations don't have anyone pushing for this relationship. This seems to generally work for those schools because they can advertise as accredited, get a fig leaf of transferring credits, but usually want you to stay and complete tranning there. Most tend to be vocational which makes a lot of that moot.

Your example (3 years) is extreme. I could not get 15 CS credits to transfer from one private, 2nd tier US college to another (Boston university). BU refused and i took the classes again and paid for them twice. It put me in the rare position of being able to compare the quality of education at the two institutions side by side.

I'd be curious to hear your observations. I did BA/MS at BU in CS (CAS of course) and found the classes often hit or miss, but the ones that were good were really good. That being said, I did have an interest in theoretical CS while many CS undergrads do not, which is what the department emphasizes.

The student:professor ratios at Boston University CS classes were much higher. I didn't realize the importance of that until i had this comparison with the other institution.

It led to many fewer questions by students, teachers assistants (something the other institution did not have and did not need because one professor could attend to all of his students), and in general less interaction between students with each other and with professors/TAs.

The curriculum at both were essentially the same for this set of classes.

Hah! Don’t leave us hanging. What was your experience between the two for classes?

I took some community college programming classes in NJ and NYC. Didn’t have to repeat the ones I did. I was in awe at how weak the curriculum was in both cases. It’s not the student’s faults imo that their programming skills were lacking. The classes weren’t challenging.

Yet some of them eventually transferred to State Uni for comp sci. It really amazed me. Wonder how they fared and if that just means that specific state school is just really easy too.

I agree except for the fact that these are both state run public schools, part of the same state school system. Citizens should be able to switch between them freely based on the needs of the time and how they wish to pursue their education.

CCs don't teach Junior or Senior (300 or 400 lv) courses. If you stay at one longer than two years it is because you are going part-time or started with college-prep courses.

I spent 3 years (including Summers) at a CC then transferred into a top 10 engineering program. The 'extra' time was required because I needed to take a year of math classes before calculus.

And IMO, the CC's pre-engineering program left me better prepared for the university's department/major coursework than some of my peers who started at the university.

> Spending three years at a community college

This makes no sense. Spend as long as you want at the community college, transfer all the credits you want, by definition they will all be 1xx or 2xx classes. Your degree will require half the classes to be 3xx & 4xx, so you will always have to spend at least two years at the university.

The STEM in me says, it should all be the same.

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