Community Colleges

Yep. That's what I did. Never got my AA.

 

Hmmmm. I thought you needed to get the AA before moving on?

 

Nope ... the majority of those who transfer do so without completing the AA ...

Not as many as you might think ...

Community College FAQs

 

The community college system in NC was beneficial to me. After moving here from California with my parents, I wanted to go straight to UNC but SAT wasn't high enough for an out of state student.

So I went to the local community college for two years, got an AA degree and all but one of my courses got accepted by UNC when I transferred as a junior.

The price was right, too.

 

But their success rate of earning a degree once they set foot on the four-year campus is better than freshman starting the university right out of the gate. I know they are farther along the path, but CC students are not getting destroyed once they hit college.

Fast Facts

 

Which stands to reason, since many 18-year-olds (esp. males) are knuckleheads.

Whoever thought it was a good idea to send them away from home to congregate with other knuckleheads in a loosely controlled environment free of parental oversight obviously never had a teenage son.

 

Not always.

I went 500+ miles away for college. a place where I knew nobody, but that was my goal from about 7th grade on. I want to escape. I needed to.

Not only that, I attended a legendary party school that is also rigid academically. I wanted that challenge but also "the social". However, I saw plenty of my older friends go to schools like Kansas, Mizzou, Nebraska, flunk out at semester and come back to community college after a year.

You're only 18 once. I encourage both of our kids (still a few years away from college) to explore where they want to live. You only really get one chance in life to pick where you want to live for a few years. Before you're 18, your family determines that. After 22 or 23, jobs, career and, eventually, your own family determines that. From 18 to 22, be selfish. Figure out where you best fit.

 

That's not true. About 44% of transfers from community colleges go on to get their bachelors. About 60% of those who begin at four-year schools earn theirs.

But even if that were true, it wouldn't be remotely informative. It's not a valid comparison. What would be informative would be comparing the completion rates of transfers to those of students (who were admitted as freshmen) at a similar level of progress. As of yet I can't get my hand on numbers to make that comparison, but given the disparities in completion rates between transfers and freshmen, it's got to be a pretty dramatic difference. Average freshman retention is around 80%, so at a minimum there's around a 75% completion rate for those freshmen who "survive" to the second year.

 

My godson didn't get accepted to his local flagship as a freshman, but that flagship offered a pathway program involving a partnership with a nearby community college. Students in this program took courses (as a cohort) at the CC and lived together in an apartment building set up sort of like a dorm (the residential part of it was a requirement). Now, mind you, just a straight transfer from the CC was entirely possible. This pathway program simply allowed for a residential experience as part of the freshman year.

So, let's see. We'll take a bunch of knuckleheads who've already demonstrated less-than-stellar academic tendencies (otherwise they'd have gotten in as regular matriculants) and we'll put them all together under one roof and in the same cluster of classes. What could go wrong?

 

You just quoted, see above,...

Of the 25% of entering community college students who transfer to four-year colleges, 62% complete a bachelor’s degree six years after transfer.

So I understand that as the students who go to make it to a 4-year school from CC, actually do very well at a 4-year school. If you told me 62% of all students who started taking their 300 level courses would finish with a degree, I would say that is a pretty strong number. Especially for students who started at CC.

 

OJ Simpson would have never made it to USC without community college

 

OK, so the numbers are ridiculously muddled. Some percentages are from an NCES survey of 2003, others are from later NCES surveys (and interpretations of those surveys). This is, like charter schools, one of those things that you have to spend hours wading through all the advocacy to come even close to the numbers, and even then you're not sure.

The problem is that the comparison involves degree-completion six years after transfer (for the community college entrants) with degree-completion six years after enrollment (for the 4-year entrants). Then, it gets compounded by the fact that some numbers come from one period (say, the early 2000s) and others come from another. Both of those numbers -- the 44% and the 62% -- came from interpretations of NCES data. I'm going to throw my hands up and just go with the 62%.

Even if we stipulate that the 62% is correct, you can't make a direct comparison to those who entered four-year colleges as freshmen, because you'd be giving the CC entrants two extra years to get their degree.

Further (and again stipulating that the 62% is correct), 4-year-entrants who reach even the 200-level (i.e., they survive their freshman year) have at a minimum a 75% chance of earning their degree over that shorter window of time (it has to be this to square the freshman retention rate and the overall six-year graduation rate). I found some institution-specific data that suggests that, by the time a typical 4-year entrant gets to his/her 300-level coursework, the likelihood of degree completion is greater than 95%, but I don't know how generalizable those data are.

So, even with two extra years, transfers from community colleges are a bit more than 20% less likely than their 4-year entrant classmates to complete their degrees. And that's with the least generous estimate of the likelihood that a 4-year entrant who reaches the 300-level will actually graduate.