1) Of course certain courses of study are more valuable than others. That's besides the point. The point was that institution matters for STEM degrees. Median starting and career income statistics are widely available; this isn't even debatable.
Making a relation between school and career income is absurd. Any added value gained by attending one school vice another decays significantly the farther you get from graduation.
Once in the civilian work force, nobody cares what school you went to, and your career progression is predominately dictated by the quality of your work and how well you work with the rest of the organization.
This is just as apparent in the Navy as it is in the civilian world. For NUPOC, I can imagine that once the Admiral makes you an offer, nobody cares which school you went to.
What does matter, however, no matter the school you attended or what industry to wish to work in is how well you did in school and what your GPA was. And that only matters in obtaining your FIRST job, from there on, it's your reputation and performance.
2) The admission rates for transfer students to reputable universities is oftentimes significantly lower than acceptance rates for incoming freshmen. Their admissions process for incoming freshmen students is more rigorous, so fewer students leave or drop out. That leaves fewer spots for transfer applicants.
If your credentials are good enough to get into a “reputable university” when you graduate high school, then they will still be good enough when you apply to college at a later date. If you decide to take classes between high school graduation and applying to said “reputable university”, the only thing that changes is that whatever classes you took at community college get added to your transcript. If you continued obtaining high grades in CC then there is no reason you wouldn’t get accepted. However, if you slacked off then, yes, your chances of getting into said “reputable university” go down.
3) Community college can help save some money, but not every class may transfer.
Stated in my original response
4) As to your point about the English paper: I suppose this is a matter of what you are seeking in your education. I don't think that being assigned an 8-page paper vs. a 20-page paper is a selling point for community college.
It is if you attend a university which charges by the credit hour. If you have a heavy loaded semester, and you could take one of classes at the CC down the street for half the price and half the work, for the same credit how is that a bad idea?
In my initial response, I wasn’t only talking about doing 2 years at CC and 2 years at a university. Sometimes it’s a good decision to take just a couple classes at CC while enrolled at a university.
Additionally, the professor in the more reputable institution will usually have a more rigorous standard by which he grades.
Bad assumption
5) As to your point about professors focusing on research: Higher education is about research. There is no way around this. It's about using what you know to explore deeper concepts and answer questions. It is not about memorizing facts from a textbook, although that is required to obtain the baseline level of knowledge needed to go further. You don't want to be learning your material in changing fields from professors whose knowledge is 5, 10, 20 years old. You want to be learning from professors who understand the material deep enough to produce quality work that advances a field. You want to build relationships with these professors early so that you can be a part of their teams in your junior/senior year, so that you have more to put on a resume than "I attended class for 4 years."
In practice higher education is about getting a job - not about research. What percentage of students get a bachelor’s degree in order to go into research?
If I’m taking a freshman/sophomore level thermodynamics class, I could care less what research my professor is doing. What I care about is learning the basics and establishing a foundation I may be able to build upon for higher level problems in future classes/research. However, if my professor is only at the university to conduct research and doesn’t care much about teaching and isn’t open to fielding questions outside of class or taking extra time in class to go over a topic that wasn’t presented clearly last lecture then that severely hampers the students’ ability to effectively learn the material.
Moreover, as a student who wasn’t interested in pursuing research, I found that the professors who had more to offer in terms of building relationships and being able to pick their brains were the ones who had real industry experience. Again, those that went to engineering school, then straight to a PhD program then straight to research and teaching were very smart and knowledgeable but tended be of the type that they had to teach, rather than they wanted to teach.
6) There is also the X-factor of being immersed in an environment surrounded by other bright, motivated students instead of a class that is largely comprised of people attending the 13th grade, and thus being pushed to excel through peer pressure.
If you don’t have enough motivation to pass the “13th grade”, things won’t change when you’re in the same position at a major institution. I agree, there are more educationally/culturally stimulating things at a university, but that is by virtue of a university being what it is, and is part of the decision one has to make when considering to go to a major institution for 4 year or start at CC.
I went to a 4-year institution, but if I could do it all over again or in the future, when my kids go to college, I would not disuade them from knocking out some classes at a CC. Mainly because GPA has more weight than actual place of education (for the same degree, in a STEM field).
