[nonameiguess]

I'm sure it heavily depends on local circumstances, but for whatever it's worth, I badly fucked up my first attempt at going to four-year right out of high school due to mental health reasons and ended up doing two years at LA City College before going back. It may have been mostly the Biology and Chemistry departments, but the quality of student there was still the highest of any school I've ever taken classes at, and that includes Georgia Tech, which is typically regarded as a top 10 engineering school. The reasons were somewhat peculiar and specific, but the fall of the Soviet Union in the late 80s left a whole lot of immigrants from former Soviet Republics fleeing the collapse and most of them ended up in LA. We had a whole lot of former engineers, scientists, and medical doctors who came to the US only to find their foreign credentials were not honored by US institutions and they had to start completely over. They utterly destroyed our curves thanks to all of the knowledge, dedication, and discipline they already had compared to an average 19 year-old.

Heck, even my Bio 101 professor was abnormally brilliant. She'd been a researcher at Harvard Medical School who worked on highly experimental treatments in a ward full of terminal patients and just finally burned out from being around so much death all the time, so there she was in Los Feliz three blocks from Scientology world headquarters teaching at a community college, probably the hardest class I've ever had to take.