An Asterisk-Ridden Education: My Community College Education and the Impact of NBC’s Community
By: Miranda Mccasland
Tags: Media Analysis, Community College, Higher Education, College, Ideology

Author at Aims Community College’s 2019 commencement ceremony, holding President’s Medallion

I started my undergrad at a community college.*

*I’m a 4.0 student.

**My mom is an administrator there — my tuition was free

***I was #3 in my senior class

****I graduated with the highest honor at my community college and I plan on graduating with the highest honors from my four-year university

When people find out I started my undergrad at a community college I have to add asterisks, footnotes and ‘buts’ all over the place. I’ve barely finished “oh yeah my community college” before I rush into the next “my mom works there — it was free” or “community college is a pride point for my family, so I didn’t apply to CSU even though I would’ve been admitted” disclaimer.

Community colleges come with an assumption — that they’re less academically rigorous, that they’re only for students who couldn’t make it at a four-year school, that the only reason you bother going to a CC is because you can’t afford a four-year experience. I’ve heard all the assumptions — from my new friends when I transferred, from my professors when they learned where I came from, on national TV analysis, from my high school. The assumption is everywhere — sometimes even at the community college.

I didn’t realize I was so tired of defending my choice to attend a community college, the peers I met at my community college or my experience of community college until this summer when I started watching NBC’s award winning sitcom: Community. The show is built around a fictional community college in the fictional Greendale Colorado and follows a Spanish study group from their first day of community college. It had been long recommended to me by basically everyone who knew I went to a community college but didn’t have experience at a community college. Within three episodes, it was like my tiredness was on steroids. I pushed through three and a half seasons hoping I would see some light at the end of the tunnel. It never came.

Was this what people thought about community colleges? Why I had felt the need to add disclaimers to my two-years at community college? Why I feel like I have to justify a perfectly sound decision?

Community is built off and around the ideas I find myself battling against. Those ideas — othering, stereotyping, exclusion — are why so many people find it funny.

Gripes expressed, let’s start here: the rigor of a community college education.

Community depicts the education at Greendale as second-rate at best. To put it gently, it’s absolute garbage. The show’s favorite professor to put on screen is “Señor Chang,” a Spanish professor who is constantly spending class focused on anything but Spanish or focused on his egotistical needs. By the end of the first semester, it’s revealed that Chang a) never earned a degree at all and b) has no training in Spanish. Tropes like this continue throughout the show — more focus is placed on events than class, professors get drunk at school events, teach other classes that they aren’t remotely qualified to teach, date students.

Funny, but clear: the education at Greendale isn’t legit. It’s something other than the education you would receive anywhere that isn’t a community college. It teaches the audience a clear ideology: community college education isn’t high caliber.

This ideology — which Cole defines as the “lens to view the world through” — is echoed in other media. Tuccairone reports that in her analysis of Evolution, a 2001 film set at a community college, the resounding themes that viewers — even those who were current community college students — picked up on was that community college professors were depicted as not taking their jobs seriously, wanting to be something bigger and better than a community college professor, or ‘lowering their standards’ because they were teaching at a community college (46–47). These professors are rarely seen teaching.

This led Tuccairone’s student viewers/subjects to conclude the exact same thing that you might when watching Community: the community college shown is a “second-rate school” (48).

It’s a faulty assumption, but one that’s built into these narratives about community colleges. It’s dangerous because we know that perceptions of a college or group can impact a student’s willingness to attend/consider a type of education. Most students won’t be exposed to a true community college experience (the one where your community college classes are often harder than your four-year classes), but they will be exposed to a form of media talking about community colleges.