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Comment by aaron-lebo | Hacker News Reader

You are absolutely right about the relative value of community college, but you pointed out the major problem: community colleges are not thought of highly at all, even though 2 years of CC credited to a bachelor's degree at a more prestigious university counts just the same.

I'm not sure how CC's get over the stigma attached to them, but it really needs to happen. They are good value.

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Because when there are fewer jobs than candidates, artificial distinctions are used to judge them, and rent seekers exploit that to extract all the economic surplus.

This is basic stuff, people. If everyone is going to college, everyone should know this.

> Because when there are fewer jobs than candidates, artificial distinctions are used to judge them, and rent seekers exploit that to extract all the economic surplus.

But that isn't what is happening in this situation. If Candidate A attends 2 years of community college and then transfers those credits to State College, his resume will still say "Bachelor's Degree - State College" the same as Candidate B who attended State College for a full 4 years.

It doesn't have anything to do with job candidates, it is purely the psychological aspect of not attending a big state uni for your first two years in college.

> This is basic stuff, people. If everyone is going to college, everyone should know this.

I'm not sure if this is snark, but is it really basic stuff for people coming out of college to know about rent seeking? I guess in an ideal world...

I wouldn't call a quality of education difference between MIT and ITT tech artificial.

Neither did he, so what's your point?

He did.

> Because when there are fewer jobs than candidates, artificial distinctions are used to judge them

Maybe the community colleges in your area are different. I attend a state run college which gets a number of these types of transfer students from a few nearby community colleges. Even at my school the standard of education is not particularly high but the transfers from community colleges regularly drop out or need remedial classes because they paid half the price and got one tenth the education.

It probably isn't obvious from my original post, but I agree with you.

In my community college, there were a number of professors with incredibly low standards for academic work. However, I tend to think this is a reflection on the level of preparedness of students coming out of high school.

The issue is, and maybe it is sad that it is this way, but it is probably better for people to end up with 1/10th of the education at 1/2 of the price and end up with less debt overall due to what they end up doing with their degrees.

And if you apply yourself, you'll learn no matter where you go. Heck, you'll find plenty on YC who advocate skipping school entirely, so community is a step up from that.

It depends a lot on the field. At my community college, the STEM classes had standards. Totally incompetent people disappeared after a semester or two of going up the coursework chain. Meanwhile, the liberal arts professors had to deal with people that couldn't write a coherent sentence if their life depended on it, even in advanced classes. However, I constantly read similarly demented and completely mangled english sentences written by graduates of the local public four year university.

I can't really recommend community college for STEM, since at least in my original state, you had to start as a freshman at university even if you had an associate's degree in science that was "guaranteed" to transfer for credit. (The engineering department's justification was "we'll accept your credits, but you still have to take everything over again.") It's a good way to get screwed, and community colleges offer very few second year science and math classes. (The liberal arts people had much less difficulty transferring.)

However, I did learn my calculus and sciences very well because I had excellent teachers that I could ask questions of if I needed to. My physics professor had been teaching for over four decades--and with a small class size of around ~20, I had plenty of opportunity to absorb the material and understand it completely. As a result, I now find myself tutoring my buddy at a $60,000/year private tech college, because my knowledge of the subjects is sound and the quality of the teaching at his school is completely terrible. Interestingly, the homework assignments and test questions are near identical in terms of subject matter covered and difficulty--the main difference is that the private tech college curves, which my professors at my community college were explicitly forbidden from doing.

In my state the universities must accept equivalent course credit from in-system community colleges. And within my own city it's widely accepted that 1st and 2nd year calculus classes at community college will have vastly better quality of teaching than you'd get taking them at the 4 year. (This reputation doesn't apply to other subjects.)

Makes it a lot easier to get personalized letters of recommendation, too. My first year science and math professors all remember me, since the class sizes were small and enthusiastic students are easily noticed. I doubt that would have been the case at a university, where I'd have been crammed in with several hundred people.

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