(IMHO during covid this option was king)
Crazy enough. That is a HUGE amount. CC isn't a huge funnel success -- stories are rare - most students drop out etc.
I sincerely doubt this for Stanford and CalTech. The only college of ~equivalent prestige to Stanford that takes a non trivial number of transfer students is Columbia and CalTech doesn’t have classes that teach material equivalent to CC courses. It’s assumed you know it already or will pick it up in an hour or two if you need it.
UC colleges are completely different because they’re forced to have a clear path for transfer students.
https://www.deanza.edu/articulation/guaranteed-admission/tag...
I'm 95% sure that didn't use to be the case. I am a transfer student from De Anza and I recall being torn between Berkeley and where I eventually did end up. Maybe it was dropped more recently?
Even without the guaranteed transfer though, the acceptance rate for transfers from local community colleges is waaay higher than applying out of high school. If you keep good grades (which is easy to do at CC because you're graded on a curve with classmates that aren't all in the same league) and apply every quarter/semester from the moment you're eligible, you're likely to get in before having exhausted classes to take at the 2 year college.