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Comment by tkojames | Hacker News Reader

I am forever thankful for California community colleges. I did not the best high school slacked off mostly c'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

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> I learned more at my community college than a pretty decent public research college.

I've heard "I learned more at X than at college" multiple times, it's become a refrain. But public university courses are pretty intellectually intensive, or at least provide good opportunities to be so; I wonder if people who say these implicitly qualify it with "that I valued / that I found was useful to my (intended) career"

I think another aspect of it is that professors at research universities don't view teaching as their main vocation but as something they have to do (their "real" job is research/writing papers). I think lecturers that focus on teaching can probably be better at it, especially at undergrad level where you're anyway pretty far from the state of the art.

> professors at research universities don't view teaching as their main vocation but as something they have to do (their "real" job is research/writing papers).

Some of them view it this way, and end up being excellent lecturers. They get laid off for not publishing often enough or successfully enough. Like the one statistics professor I've had that was worth a damn.

I find universities forcing both research and teaching on the same people quite bewildering nowadays. Yes, you used to be able to get super fresh information directly from the people doing the research back in the day, but guess what, nowadays that's not what's in the curriculum anyway and your lecturer doing great research probably won't really translate into them being able to better teach the basics of their field.

Same. My peers were going crazy trying to get ready for university. Once my plan was to do community college and transfer, the last two years of high school became really easy. Tuition was something like $11/unit, and textbooks were actually a bigger expense.

I have a 4 year degree from a state school now, and even though I missed out on some of the dorm shenanigans/networking/etc, I’m doing just fine now. And I never had any student loans to worry about. (Admittedly, my parents did help pay for my degree, but $2500/semester at a state university is very, very reasonable.)

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