Great topic. Lots of mixed feelings. This thread is becoming generally negative on community colleges (CCs) so I will balance it out with my overwhelmingly positive experience.

Graduated HS in 2007. Was not ambitious in HS whatsoever. Soon after graduating I realized I needed to get my shit together. Education was the best bet at that time. My grandpa was a CC guidance counselor so the CC path was acceptable and familiar in my family. I never actually got much formal guidance counseling from him by the way. The first semester was disorienting but isn't all big change in life? I got much more confident that I could transfer once I discovered IGETC [1]. Every CC class was clearly marked to show what IGETC area it fulfilled. The UCs even provide statistics on the transfer admission rate for each major. My family was poor on paper so I got a lot of financial support. $5K to $10K per year in grants. I actually had $2K in savings purely from grants by the time I transferred to Cal! I chuckle a bit at UC kids taking on $50K in debt for lower-level general education whereas I ended up getting paid $2K to do the same! I transferred on-time, in 2 years. I pretty much had to devote my time to studies, though. It was very lonely. Continuing to live with my mom sucked. I regret not finding ways to socialize productively more during CC. But you can totally find concentrations of ambitious, high-performing peers. The advanced STEM classes had a lot of serious academics for example. I met some sharp people working on the school newspaper who probably went on to significant success in life. The professors were high-quality in general. Most had graduated from Stanford or UCs (colleges in the University of California system) themselves. They were totally focused on teaching us rather than doing research like most UC professors. When you get to CC it's really clear right away that a lot of students will not transfer even though that is their stated goal. Some just have too much life responsibility: needing to balance studies with full-time work to support a family and pay bills, etc. That is a tragedy. There were quite a few spoiled kids who probably subconsciously knew they would never really need to make a big career for themselves and weren't motivated for reasons like that. There were a lot of peers who unfortunately just had bad mindsets about education. You could tell that they didn't accept they needed to start being uncool and start reading a lot of books. There were a lot of peers who unfortunately were probably just bewildered by the bureaucracy of schools and just couldn't figure out the system and weren't being encouraged to persist at their studies. A lot of the students who don't transfer or get a degree as intended are up against some combination of those factors. Some of those problems are solvable by CCs. Others are deep-rooted and I don't think it's reasonable to expect CCs to fix them. Maybe we should just set the expectation that a lot of CC students won't transfer or get a degree simply because they are catering to "at-risk" populations. All-in-all CC was a smashing success for me in terms of sparking my passion for learning and providing an affordable foundation for career success.

[1] https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requi...