Not “snakeoil” per say; employers will care about your history of education: but as an aspiring computer engineer currently in CC looking to move to a university, I’ve learned exactly 0 useful things at community college. Outside of the piece of paper you get at the end, it’s all useless busywork, testing how much bullshit you can put up with. Everything useful I’ve learned in life has been for free, provided kindly by passionate communities. Hopefully this changes in university.
I think the value employers place in modern education in the United States is snakeoil, however.
I’ve learned exactly 0 useful things at community college.
Funnily enough, this is why I left my university and went to a CC. The opportunities for me at a CC have been much greater (especially when it comes to part-time employment positions). The smaller course sizes in my digital design classes in Quartus Prime (which were not present in the lower division curriculum at my original university) allowed me to excel so much that I ended up as a TA for my class. In addition, because I wasn’t asphyxiating myself in a tiny auditorium of 400 people, I found it much easier to approach my professors 1 on 1 to talk about physics outside my course curriculum, which has helped me network and prepare to line up REUs next year. I feel as though the people at my CC are also more down to earth and hardworking than those at my university. The student leadership there didn’t feel as daunting, and felt action-oriented (as opposed to being a pure popularity contest), so I was able to join student government. What I have been achieving over the course of 6 months at a CC is infinitely better than what I was getting at a full university, and I am no longer depressed.
Everyone’s experience is different. In my case, my original university was highly hyped, and very expensive, but left me sorely disappointed, and I was not happy with what I’d be learning according to my course roadmap.
I definitely learned useful things in community college – at least in so far as general education courses can be considered useful. There were some duds, of course. However, I don’t feel like I got much more out of university classes of the same level.
With that being said, you may just have the misfortune of attending a lackluster school.
Not “snakeoil” per say; employers will care about your history of education: but as an aspiring computer engineer currently in CC looking to move to a university, I’ve learned exactly 0 useful things at community college. Outside of the piece of paper you get at the end, it’s all useless busywork, testing how much bullshit you can put up with. Everything useful I’ve learned in life has been for free, provided kindly by passionate communities. Hopefully this changes in university.
I think the value employers place in modern education in the United States is snakeoil, however.
Funnily enough, this is why I left my university and went to a CC. The opportunities for me at a CC have been much greater (especially when it comes to part-time employment positions). The smaller course sizes in my digital design classes in Quartus Prime (which were not present in the lower division curriculum at my original university) allowed me to excel so much that I ended up as a TA for my class. In addition, because I wasn’t asphyxiating myself in a tiny auditorium of 400 people, I found it much easier to approach my professors 1 on 1 to talk about physics outside my course curriculum, which has helped me network and prepare to line up REUs next year. I feel as though the people at my CC are also more down to earth and hardworking than those at my university. The student leadership there didn’t feel as daunting, and felt action-oriented (as opposed to being a pure popularity contest), so I was able to join student government. What I have been achieving over the course of 6 months at a CC is infinitely better than what I was getting at a full university, and I am no longer depressed.
Everyone’s experience is different. In my case, my original university was highly hyped, and very expensive, but left me sorely disappointed, and I was not happy with what I’d be learning according to my course roadmap.
I definitely learned useful things in community college – at least in so far as general education courses can be considered useful. There were some duds, of course. However, I don’t feel like I got much more out of university classes of the same level.
With that being said, you may just have the misfortune of attending a lackluster school.
Classic computer science thingy. You learn nothing at all there if you already passionately learn programming