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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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