My experience at community college

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't that much enlightenment that can be packed into "the syntax of if statements."

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.

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't like it at all -- I was commuter and spent most of the time I wasn't at school at my job. I dropped out 3 days into my second semester.

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'm now a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University -- a top-tier research university working on resilience engineering; I'm proposing this year and hoping to defend about 1.5 years from now.

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.

By far, the most important classes I ever took were the following:

- Intro, Intermediate, Advanced C# programming. I never did C# programming before, .NET was VERY NEW 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'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.

- 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 most real software engineering course 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 2002/3 and I taught CMU-313 in 2021. We need more of that style of course.

All in all -- do community college if that's what you have access to, work hard, work with your professors, and it will (hopefully) not be a limiting factor.

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.

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, "yes, I've had experience with that".

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.

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't have a degree (that took some negotiating on my and my boss'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.

I'm very very fortunate that I'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'm grateful I've had the chances I have, and the help where I've gotten it. But it hasn't been easy, and a better college could have made a big difference.

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're learning a trade--usually an AAS degree-- it's common. Though unfortunately AAS degrees usually have fewer courses that can be applied to a 4-year degree down the road. It's a trade off: less expensive & faster path to employability vs. longer term career growth. If you find yourself needing/wanting the full degree later on then on average you'll end up taking more coursework than if you started on a 4 year track.

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.

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.

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.

There'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't match, like working with cutting-edge technology or doing internships/work-study with real research groups.

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/ 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.

We do a terrible of job of helping kids to work out whats a good study plan, and the belief "turn your hobby into your jobbie" 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't know how to work out how aptitude and interest and drive intersect here, beyond the trivial.

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't work hard, not uncommon for a 20 year old.

Maybe they "weeded me out" early too?

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'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.

If someone is a poor adult, schools stop considering your parent's finances once you're 24, so financial aid at top universities can also be quite generous in these situations.

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.

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.

2) Transfers, particularly when the schools have agreements guaranteeing acceptance. Depending on a number of other factors, this can be dirt cheap as well.

Its "Ivy League (+Stanford, +MIT)" or "anything that checks a box" or nothing. The last being the reality for programmers and a handful of other "professional" trades (a federal labor distinction, not me), unless you are not comfortable being ignored by 10x more recruiters than a degreed person is.

Community college firmly fits in the "anything that checks a box" middle just as much as a coveted state 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's degree.

The associates degree can be a cheap way to get half of a bachelor's degree, since it will transfer as a prerequisite.

Just do the thing and move on. Or don't. Or go to Ivy League and schools on par with that, if its an option for you.

But yeah, I can'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/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't overlook them, the community colleges that is. Given all the status chasers and min/max optimizers here, I feel like someone would need to know this.

Like comparing art classes, I made much better art at community college. And they weren't consummate cheaters.

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.

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.

But I have spent a lifetime, looking up noses…

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.