alt Hacker NewsExcellent point about CC’s. The downside is that instructor quality varies considerable both within and between CCs, and many students drop out or are not provided with adequate guidance in terms of GE requirements and transferability.
In terms of costs of UC other than Berkeley, (Davis, Cal Poly, UCLA, etc…) 16k in current times is a great bargain especially given the pipeline to grad school which is great even at non-Berkeley UCs.
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I can only speak for my own experiences, but I found my instructors at community college to be absolutely fantastic and even better than the ones I had when I eventually transferred to a UC. I had transferred to a UC first, ran out of money and then I wrapped up at a cheaper CSU years later.
At a UC you're probably going to be interacting with teaching assistants anyway.
I have to completely disagree with your last paragraph. No one should be thinking grad school right after a B.A. Go and see the world for a little bit. Excluding maybe law and medicine.
Even then, I've seen this horribly backfire in families. The kid is expected to do really well in college and then become a doctor, the pressure is too much and they just spaz out.
Next thing you know your a college dropout couchsurfing because your parents are threatening to send you back to the old country for an arranged marriage.
> many students drop out
I'm pretty sure that's the case at UC too. I don't know UC, but at my 4 year engineering school it felt like 25% attrition every year; if you only do a year and drop out, better to not be paying enormous student loans for probably the rest of your life for that.
If you do two or three years and drop out, better to have a degree, even if it's just an Associates.
If you know you'll make it all the way to a Bachelors, yeah, maybe it'd be better to go direct. But even then, you might get smaller class sizes (and better experiences) at a CC because of the relative levels of the student bodies. Lots of people taking calculus based physics of mechanics at a UC and not so many at a CC, so the UC might do lectures in a hall but the CC might have it in a classroom.