[wasdfff]

The community college also has an automotive repair program. You’d be hard pressed to find a decent school with an IT or any other of these vocational programs at their main campuses.

That’s because it trains for the job, not for the field. While you’d probably get up and running easier with an IT degree since you know the current tooling, you’d be worse off than someone with the conceptual knowledge that comes with a more general CS degree, and you’d therefore have a tougher time adapting to whatever new technology that didn’t exist in your IT program but was touched on conceptually in the CS coursework.

[ocdtrekkie]

My community college is extremely "decent", thank you. In most cases, other than needing to check of the "have a bachelor's degree" box for job application purposes, most people will probably get more bang for their buck in a community college than they ever will in a fancier school. Depending on what your local community college offers, there's a good chance that for a fraction of the cost, you can pick up nearly anything you'd want to know (or just like to learn, at that price).

As someone whose taken a fair number of IT degree classes, I'd say there's a fair bit of conceptual knowledge involved. And in the case of networking, for example, most of the standards and protocols you're being taught how to work with have been around since the mid-80s, and aren't showing significant signs of going away any time soon.

I'd say the CS vs. IT split would probably surprise you. I have gone up to the bachelor's level in a game programming degree, and it was amazing how poorly people who were proficient in writing C++ couldn't handle basic PC troubleshooting, it's a different skill set entirely.

[flukus]

I went through community college over a decade ago, I've spent a depressing amount of time since teaching people with CompSci degrees about CompSci concepts.

I've also run internships with CompSci graduates and have to say they're basically unemployable when they graduate, they might know some theory but they can't build anything. Community College teaches you to build things, so you come out with skills relevant to the workplace and you can fill in the CompSci stuff later.