I'm pretty sure it's like that most places, being a community college -> state university transfer myself (in Illinois), and knowing plenty of other people who went from community college to Northwestern and a few other nice private colleges. Anything out of your degree's core reqs. seems to usually be easy to transfer from community college, and that's usually what the first 2 years are. CC is also a good place for knocking out your math requirements, and a lot of the people in my math classes were traditional university students doing it to save money, or to get it done during a summer semester at home.

Problems might be more from not having a decent community college to go to, families that think community college is unacceptable, or just slacker inertia. I had an excellent community college, and went back to school as an adult over 10 years after dropping out of high school, so none of that stuff applied to me.

edit: better explanation at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4338579