[jesseclay]

Another anecdote on the power of community college:

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.

[jdhawk]

Not all community colleges are the same. If you live in close proximity to universities with high academic standards, most of the professors are going to be recent graduates of those programs, or educators picking up extra cash and some experience teaching at CC.

BFE Community College will not have the same level of academic excellence.

[alexisnorman]

Yeah, while I think community college is great, the one I attended (GCC, in AZ) basically felt like high school all over again. Horrible professors, worse students, boring (and ridiculously easy) material; I hated it so much that I ditched college for two years before deciding to go back to school at a university. As soon as I was taking university classes I started to wonder why I hadn't just started at a university to begin with. It's good to hear there's community colleges out there that emit the same level of passion in students/professors though.

[nearengine]

I took a couple math courses (discrete math and differential equations, I think) at GCC and MCC while attending ASU for Computer Engineering, and I thought the CC professors were more helpful and more passionate about teaching undergrads than the profs at ASU. In my experience the university professors were more worried about their own projects and acted like teaching 20 year olds was above them.

As far as the material goes, the curriculum of the classes I took was nearly identical to the ones at ASU. The diffeq course actually had a higher workload than the ASU version. It's interesting that CC/university experiences differ so much even among students of the same school.

[PakG1]

Even within the same school, there are different professors of differing quality. I remember when I was choosing my courses for the next semester during university, I'd always check ratemyprofessor.com before making a final decision on a course.

[jamesli]

Location, location, location, to borrow it from real estate market. In places like Bay Area, there is a surplus of excellent talents competing for academic positions. If one can't get one in Standard, Cal, UCDavis, USF, etc, they will fight for the positions in the community colleges. So it is not uncommon to meet excellent professors in community colleges in such places. I know a few who taught in community colleges in Bay Area and eventually got positions in 4-year universities in Midwest. I bet they wouldn't hesitate to come back if they can get a position here.

It could be quite a different story in other places. I lived in a small town in the Midwest before. It has a big university, which one might think would provide some good staffs to the local community colleges. The reality was it was pretty bad. The only students who were interested in learning were middle-aged, who took the classes more for leisure. The teachers were aloof, most of whom were not qualified in teaching in a college, IMHO.

[jesseclay]

Agreed -- little doubt that the Bay Area attracts teaching talent that colleges in less desirable areas aren't able to. That said, I feel strongly in the potential for community colleges nation wide to raise their standards and become places of first choice for citizens not entirely set on an expensive 4 year university with questionable value.

[Kalium]

Yup. It's all about proximity to strong universities. If there's one nearby, the local CCs will be excellent. However, this is not the typical case.

[Taylorious]

To be fair not all universities are the same either. A university may have a great engineering program but have terrible liberal arts professors. Why pay thousands for an English class where you learn to write a basic five paragraph essay (which you should have learned in highschool), when you can pay a few hundred instead.

[burger_moon]

Yes when I attended CC some of my instructors taught during the day at a private university that is ranked very high. One would always joke about how we were getting the same education as the students at the private school but for a third of the price since it was the same curriculum he taught there.

[spacecowboy_lon]

Yes I had to update my linkedin to try and make it clear it was Bedford Colledge (a FE college) and not the University of Bedfordshire where I went to do my Mech Eng Btech.

Bedfordshire University is regularly last in the UK legue tables on Universities.

[nether]

I've heard some profs at Santa Monica College also teach at USC.

[jdhawk]

Sure, Austin Community College is littered with University of Texas people.

[zachberger]

I was frequently pushed and challenged by excellent professors who had true passion for their subjects

I'm paying $47,336 to go to a private institution and wish this was true. Internal politics and tenure have ensured friends of department chairs have gotten the jobs irregardless of teaching ability, skill, research, knowledge in the subject area..

[markdown]

OT:

> irregardless

regardless is fine.

[sneak]

> and wish this was true.

*were

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjunctive_mood

[pervycreeper]

Using the conditional mood that way is common in American English. Hardly a strict error.

[dfar1]

When expressing a wish, use "were".

[dllthomas]

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3038

[ehrman]

Blame his professors.

[benihana]

so is irregardless.

Can I ask why you take the time to correct someone when it was perfectly clear what the intent of the sentence was?

[markdown]

I live in a post-colonial country where English is the official language but 90% of the population have another language as their mother-tongue.

There is therefore a lot of "broken" english spoken, and I guess I'm just used to correcting people (and being corrected myself).

Irregardless is one of those words that is becoming OK to say just because so many people use it.

Language adapts and therefore English is descriptive rather than prescriptive, but I'd prefer if the opposite were true.

A statement in a programming language means the same regardless of the education-level, ethnicity, or social status of the reader. I wish the same were true for English.

Instead we have nonsense like Biweekly, which may refer to an event that occurs either twice weekly or once every two weeks. Why should it mean the latter when we have fortnightly for that?

----

Anyway, I like to correct people (in as polite a manner as possible) because I like being corrected myself.

[resu_nimda]

A statement in a programming language means the same regardless of the education-level, ethnicity, or social status of the reader. I wish the same were true for English.

That would make English very boring and dry. What of poetry and evocative prose? Natural languages and programming languages serve very different purposes, despite their similarities.

Natural languages, since their inception, have been subjective reflections of people, emotions, cultures, points in time. What you wish for isn't even possible, due to the fact that different people will always have the potential to interpret things differently, based on their genetic predispositions and life experiences.

If we tried to make languages more prescriptive, we wouldn't end up with some golden era where everybody communicates amazingly with each other, it would be more like 1984 where the potential for creativity and emotional expressivity has been largely diminished.

---

Edit: I do understand the point, and of course I try to use words "properly" most of the time. There is a difference between inventing new constructs and usages in order to express something, and just simply being "wrong." E.g. mixing up "your" and "you're" is a pretty cut-and-dried error. But, at the end of the day, all the rules are totally subjectively made up, and their only true purpose is to make it easier for people to understand each other, so if you can accomplish that, the rules don't actually matter.

[markdown]

I think we agree with each other. Words like "ain't" entering the common lexicon (usually in spoken english) is fine by me ie. Words formed out of contractions of other words/phrases, or entirely new inventions.

What I mostly get riled up about are words or phrases that are just plain wrong, but that have been used so widely that some dictionaries have accepted them as correct.

Eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om7O0MFkmpw

[maximuscoolimus]

Brush him off.

As a foreigner I feel the same about English and its declining quality of grammar on the web

[tacotime]

I think it's just an evolution. Not every experiment is successful.

[mtVessel]

Biweekly means every two weeks. Semiweekly means twice a week. (Fortnightly doesn't mean anything outside of the Commonwealth.)

Please keep (politely) correcting people. It's only us against the hordes!

[jejones3141]

OTOH, were it not for bad Latin speakers, we wouldn't have the Romance languages. A John Simon/William Safire of the era is an important source of data on their development--he wrote a list of proper Latin terms and the corresponding words in the bad Latin he was seeing and/or hearing. Dang it, it's not caballus, it's equus!

[jacalata]

> Biweekly means every two weeks.

Since when, exactly? http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/18553?rskey=7qC25f&result=2#ei...

[merrua]

> Fortnightly doesn't mean anything outside of the Commonwealth

Really? I live and learn. I thought that was commonplace.

[teh_klev]

In the spirit the correctness and accuracy, which Commonwealth? :)

[tacotime]

"Irregardless is one of those words that is becoming OK to say just because so many people use it."

...literally describes our ENTIRE language. It's kinda what language is... I know "kinda" isn't officially a word yet but I like it and I'm guessing you know my intended meaning.

[icebraining]

As a non-native speaker, I like when people correct me; it makes me sad to see them downvoted. On the other hand, it could be argued that since I already write well enough to be understood, I should disregard further improvements, but I just can't agree with that.

[rifung]

Why wouldn't you want to help the person improve his/her English?

[cbd1984]

Because it isn't an improvement, much like how getting someone who spells it 'color' to spell the word 'colour' or vice-versa.

[vacri]

'colo[u]r' is merely a spelling difference. 'irregardless' is a double-negative to some people, and not to others. It's an ambiguous word.

[jdnier]

No, not really. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/irregardless

[capedape]

I recently took some classes at city college in SF as well. One of my professors teaches the same class at Stanford and said he doesn't water the curriculum down for the CC class.

I agree with others that this has a lot to do with location. The classes I took were as rigorous as any other non-community college I've attended outside the bay area.

[rosstex]

That's a wonderful story of choosing Stanford over Berkeley, but as a Berkeley student... congrats!

[ww520]

CCSF is an excellent community college. One of the best in the country. Too bad it's mired in political fight over state accreditation and students are scared away.

[joedavison]

Congratulations man! You earned it.