In my case I grew up poor, without much opportunity, and the (again, at the time) dirt cheap rates, open admission and guaranteed transfer to a local 4-year gave me opportunity I absolutely didn't have in the few years before I got sick and tired of the dead-end shitty hourly part-time jobs I could get.
Many of my classmates were immigrants and refugees, there to learn English, or get started in their new lives. Now, many years later, they're happy productive citizens, married, with families, working six figure jobs...easily paying off each year what they're entire community college education cost any sort of taxpayer subsidies. Most of them have gone on to get M.S. and even a couple of PhDs.
The doors to get into higher education don't admit everybody equally, but sometimes you can get into other doors if you're willing to go in the side entrance. On the other side, I've worked pretty consistently with people who went to much more highly ranked schools than I did, or came from better pedigrees, and we've all ended up in the same place.
Bonus: my entire college education, from Freshman through my M.S. cost about what a reasonable family sedan cost, and raised my marketability so much that I paid it all off by the time I finished school. I hear of peers, decades later, still paying hundreds of dollars a month on insane student loans, and I feel really lucky to have stumbled into the path I ended up on...despite a little pride swallowing.