by cge | 2025-07-15 14:16:29+00:00
The point here seems to have been to obtain degrees as quickly as possible, without concern for actually learning. I'd also note that depending on where you're located and how far you're willing to go, there are often many other options, and high school can, I think, often be skipped entirely.

But even for students who do care about and enjoy classes, the idea of finding routes around parts of the process that are not beneficial can be useful. I didn't find secondary schools to be enjoyable or conducive to learning, and knew that I enjoyed community college classes much more; I found that in California I could simply test out of high school, and did so after seventh grade, instead going the guaranteed-admission route through community college. Then, at a university, knowing the system well, I aggressively avoided taking classes where I felt I would not learn much, mostly within my major's requirements: if I felt an upper division class with an equivalent graduate class would be boring, for example, I would swap them; when I felt I already knew anything I'd learn in the basic programming class required for physics majors, I successfully petitioned the department to have my research units, where I was programming extensively, cover the programming requirement. In part, this was not to finish faster, but so that I could take fewer, more rewarding classes and focus on them more intently, while also doing research.

I would say that I think guaranteed admission programs work very well in a wide variety of circumstances, and the stigma around them, and community colleges, seems quite unjustified. For students, they guarantee admission into often very strong universities with a process that is much more stable and reliable than standardized tests and arbitrary admissions decisions. They mean that the student takes lower-division classes that are much smaller and more personal than they would be at a major university, and takes them in a significantly more flexible setting where they often have fewer stresses. They can then transfer to a good university, going straight into mostly upper-division classes that will also be more personal, and where the benefit of the university's faculty will be more pronounced. And if they don't perform very well at the community college, they still have the ability to transition to getting an associate's degree, or to go to a lower-tier university. For universities interested in admitting students who will do well, it also seems beneficial: strong performance at a community college, an academic setting much closer to a university than to a high school, is likely a much stronger indicator of whether they will flourish in a university setting, and some pressure is taken off of large lower-division classes.

And for students who don't enjoy high school, I think that community colleges offer a compelling alternative: with their lower level courses, they essentially offer high-school-level material in the academic format of a university, with much more flexibility, less but more focused class time, less imposed work, and more reliance on students studying and learning in they ways they find best, or failing, with that failure being seen as the fault of the student rather than the instructor, meaning the instructor does not need to focus on forcing students to study. Despite the perception the author had of the route being for mediocre students, almost everyone I know who went through them were very good students, and chose that option either for its clear benefits or because they were in unusual circumstances: it was the process of choice for young undergraduates in California, for example, at least when I was a student.

I did always feel it odd that some relatives of mine looked down on the route, however. As a physicist, I'm not sure how many people even know or care where my bachelor's is from, much less where I started it.