Back in 2009 I enrolled at Community College of San Francisco. I was 19 and had no idea what I wanted to do career wise, so I took broad and rigorous curriculum focused on transferring to UC-Berkeley.

The 2 years I spent there were some of the best of my life. I was frequently pushed and challenged by excellent professors who had true passion for their subjects (a few even had Ph.D.s). I grew a passion for learning Spanish (a subject that I had found painful in high school) among many others and got involved with several extracurricular groups. By my second year I was an elected student government senator and president of the business club. I was amazed by all the school had to offer hungry students and I took advantage of every opportunity. Not to mention I met some of my closet friends in life geeking out in study groups.

When it came time to apply to 4 year universities (fall and spring of my second and final year) I decided to apply to Stanford in addition to my originally intended UC-Berkeley. Just a few months later I was shocked to accept Stanford’s offer of transfer admission to complete my undergraduate degree. Going to a place like Stanford would have been unthinkable for me just a few years earlier in high school, back then I had pretty average grades (around a 3.4) and mediocre test scores. Community college let me re-invent myself as a student and start with a completely fresh slate.

When I got into Stanford I eventually started to focus in on a major and skill-set, taking a ton of CS classes in the process. While I hadn’t studied CS in community college (although I think they do offer it), I strongly feel the high level of general curriculum I took prepared me to major in nearly anything I would have liked at Stanford. I now work as a full-time software engineer, something I had no knowledge of whatsoever when I first started community college.

No doubt my admission to Stanford is an outlier for community college students (only a tiny percentage are admitted), however a ton of very intelligent and eager students transfer to 4 year universities every year, including several of my close friends. They have now entered the workforce and are highly contributing members to society and the tax-base.

I could go on forever about the benefits of community college (and in some ways how certain things were better than at a place like Stanford), however the short of it is that indeed, I also owe it all to community college, too.

My kids will be strongly urged to go to community college, and I recommend it to everyone I'm close to. I may have missed out on college friendships, but I moved away after college anyway. I had about $13k loan debt at the end of 4 years, and I paid that off 2 years later even though it took me 9 months to land a job (because I didn't study CS and went for web development)

The IGETC program ensured that my education was equivalent to what I would have gotten at a UC as a freshmen and sophomore.

My teachers were mostly Stanford and Berkeley PHDs. They were dedicated to teaching. Not trying to balance research and teaching. 30 people per class, maximum. Arguably, I got a better education than UC students.

And obviously, cost. My mom raised me and my brother. On paper, we were rather poor. The financial grants for students from low-income families essentially paid for all costs. If I had been really savvy with my money, I actually could have saved a few grand each year.

I transferred to UC Berkeley after 2 years, right on time.

When I did, I started taking remedial classes, trying to rebuild what I should have learned in high school. After a couple years I entered a real major, graduated with a couple A.S. degrees and an almost 4.0. It cost something like $50/credit hour when I went. I think the entire program cost me under $5k. Today, it's about $12k. I think I still could have swung it by just adding another year.

This got me immediate entrance in the local state school where I entered as a Junior and finished up my undergraduate degree -- again while working full time. It was paid for almost entirely by grants. I think it was a little over $10 for those final two years. Today it's about double again. Harder, but again, doable.

I had to work full-time the entire time, got married in the middle, it took me almost 7 years, but at every increment I was able to use my advancing education to get radically better jobs.

Later I went back, got an M.S., but this time I had a few years of high paying tech jobs and I just wrote a check every semester. It also wasn't terribly expensive.

The CC covered all of the core courses I could have possibly wanted, and the instructors were pretty much as good as what I encountered at state school. In fact, of my professors, most of the ones who were the most dedicated to educating their students were my CC professors. When I entered University, I was incredibly prepared for the academic life there and had no problem making it through the program with another near 4.0 GPA.

If I had a second chance, I would follow this route again, even if I had money and better opportunity growing up. I also found many life-long friends at CC who were on a similar life-path and it's been enjoyable watching each other as we progress in our careers.

The stigma about CC's have to stop and the place it needs to die is in the high schools. Many kids come out of college counseling classes at high school thinking that if they don't go to an Ivy that they're basically going to fail out of life and end up dead from a cheap drug overdose. For most people, it matters approximately zero percent in their day to day work lives. I and my old CC friends routinely work with people who went to far better and more expensive schools than I did and have found plenty of workforce success.

I'm not sure how CC's get over the stigma attached to them, but it really needs to happen. They are good value.

Another positive about CCs is since they are so cheap you can actually take your time a find the right major for you. I tried a bunch of different stuff before something stuck and with the exception of opportunity costs that extra exploration cost me about $500. I consider that a pretty good deal.

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...

Good point. That was a big reason I started my education at a community college. Classes were cheap, small, and there was and agreement for automatic admission with full credit transfer between that CC and the university I wanted to attend.

In addition, the CC was also 10 miles from my home instead of the 35 miles to the university campus, which was one more reason. For me, it was a no-brainer to go to the CC for two years and then transfer.

All I can say is that there are some awful teachers like the one above saying DOS is Unix and such complete nonsense, but I've also come across some of the most amazing teachers that even my now-in-4-year-universities friends from high school wish they had for some of the classes we share. Yes, the level of education is not the same, but for the general classes, it's not so different, and sometimes can be a unique and nice experience. Plus, you can transfer, and those classes can count towards your degree. Not everyone is in a CC to get a better job, a lot of people end up transferring to such "top" universities like UCLA, UC Berkeley, Stanford, USC and the like (is it obvious I live in California? :) )

Lastly, none of this is stopping me from supplementing my education on my own. There are some topics that are rarely taught in many places (like, say, Mac/iPhone programming) I'm interested in. I would hope that's the case with anyone and everyone, not just people involved in top universities and Y Combinator :p

First of all, community college is a depressing place to be. It's like a cross between high school, juvenile hall, and the DMV.

For example, a lot of the students at community colleges are stoners who are only there because their parents have conditioned their financial support on college attendance, and those are the people who you will have to compete with for enrollment in impacted classes, and who will drag down your grade on group projects. The labs, libraries, and other facilities are pretty much a joke compared to what you get to use at a good UC or CSU, or even a good public high school. You are unlikely to develop personal connections that will help you build your career.

On top of all of that, transferring is not as easy at it might seem. You have to watch the transfer office like a hawk to make sure they don't screw up your paperwork. I had a guaranteed admission agreement, and even so, I caught multiple mistakes and miscommunications between the community college and the UC which would have voided my agreement, or delayed my transfer for a year. De Anza has one of the highest transfer rates in the country, so I can only assume things are even worse at other schools.

While you are trying to push your way through two years (at least) in this depressing and dysfunctional environment, your friends at CSUs and UCs will be enjoying higher quality classmates, instructors, and facilities, living the real college life, getting cool internships and other career opportunities, and making personal connections with people who will be successful in their fields.

In the end, the amount of money I saved by going to community college and transferring to a UC, compared to going to a UC for four years, adds up to the cost of a new Toyota Camry. That's a trivial amount of money, now that I look back on it years later -- a couple hundred dollars a month in student loans over a standard repayment term. Even people who are repaying their student loans don't bat an eye at spending that kind of money on a car, but for some reason people are apprehensive about spending it on two years of quality education and life experiences.

This may seem excessively negative, but I think it is a necessary counterbalance to a lot of the advice I see when this kind of issue comes up.

In the summer before my freshman year, I didn't really have much to do, and so I decided to take up a course. My options were to either take it at the UC where I'd attend, or to take an equivalent offering at a local CC. When I looked at the price, there was a 10-fold difference, $2000 against $200.

It was a no brainer to enroll at the CC: transferring credits was easy because the UC system and the CC system already have an agreement [1]. This is in addition to the transfer agreement between the two institutions, where CC students are guaranteed admission to some of the UCs if they fulfill the requirements [2].

Before the first day, I recall having low expectations; I had bought into the mindset that a smaller tuition meant a shabbier campus and a worse experience. I was dreadfully wrong: the place was modern, and my class size numbered around 15 people.

More over, its population was diverse. I didn't see only college students; there were middle schoolers, high schoolers, international students, and even parents dragging their children to camps. In general, the place had people serious enough about their education that they would spend a nice summer doing so.

Here, it seemed was a greater emphasis on the community side of college. I want to mention that this is in contrast to what I've previous seen. I came from a high school which didn't focus on getting people ahead, but on only keeping them from following behind; that was the primarily the idea of summer school. I've also heard of high school students paying for private SAT/ACT tutoring, and for online AP courses. In hindsight, CCCs act as equalizers in the field of education -- I would even say they are the modern day equivalent of churches in our state.

[1] http://www.assist.org/web-assist/welcome.html

[2] http://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/transfer/guarant...

Not having to worry about financials really helped in reducing the pressure of changing majors. I went from CS to Mfg Engineering. If I had to factor in an additional $20000 into that, I probably would be working in a job I disliked rather than exploring other options.

On top of going to school for free, and living rent free, I was able to have a job for a few years which basically paid for my expenses in a 4-year.

Hardest part of it all was convincing my parents that I didn't want to go to Berkley even though I was accepted, but would rather go to a CC. The stigma behind CCs was the only hurdle.

All in all, got free school, had a savings, and knew what I wanted to do for a career. Would recommend it to anyone. PLUS I got to have my mom's cooking for lunch and dinner.

A lot of the Ivy League folks at my current coding job are "surprised" that I started at a CC. I went transferred to a UC, and the CC classes were smaller, the teachers were of better quality, and they were more accessible whenever I needed help.

But no, we sell college as the entire "package" -- Getting laid in the dorms, doing MDMA, getting away from your parents for the first time, etc. This "package" has added costs.

I remember the stigma about going to community college (even in the Bay Area, California) when all my high school peers were going straight to Stanford, UC Berkeley, Brown, etc.

But I remember that the CC classes were tough, afforded me a ton of independence and personal responsibility, and to my surprise, found my professors were also concurrently teaching at Stanford or UC Berkeley.

The CC had guaranteed transfer agreements with certain University of California (UC) campuses, and also had a neat program called https://assist.org which allows students to be smart about mapping the relevant CC courses with the equivalent [transferable] courses at the 4-year institution of choice.

I saved a ton of money, worked my way through CC, took a gap year to work full-time to save up (and/or internships to build my resume), and was able to graduate UC in only 1.5 years afterwards (while also working on campus). E.g. 2 years CC + 1.5 years UC.

Sure, I missed out on some college experiences, but I matured quick, it allowed me to ride out the recession into a very strong position, and I cannot recommend it enough to young folks today. Especially today.

For those wondering, I graduated into a down market, but ended up in various tech and engineering positions, with no discernible difference between my peers who had gone straight to Stanford or Brown or wherever else -- and in most cases, I somehow [luckily?] ended up faring a lot better than most of them.

Lastly -- your resume will only reflect the diploma from the 4-year institution, not that anyone's asked, but you do not get put into a second-tier or second-class position because you started at a CC and transferred into a UC or 4-year, which I recall, was one of my early worries when I was starting.

I'd love to reverse the stigma about CC's, because I'm immensely proud whenever I see other CC success stories -- it is the path less taken, and in many cases a lot harder upfront because of that stigma and the amount of independence and personal responsibility involved -- but I think the dividends can be rewarding long-term.