I finally graduated from college this year after 34 years. I spent about 4 semesters at a community college and I made it halfway to the degree which was my goal. Here's how I felt.
I rapidly arrived at the feeling that I was a product, that I was an object to be monetized. I felt like every minute I spent on campus was an opportunity for someone or something to extract value from me. It's long been a meme that credit card banks will set up booths during the first weeks of classes, to lure in students on too-good-to-be-true introductory rate plans. This is true and more. There are creepy little handmade flyers tucked innocuously into a corner which promise gift cards to students who'll participate in medical research studies. There are bookstores and food stores and food carts and vending machines. There are sandwich boards advertising classes and tours and things.
There are even handouts of free stuff, such as the USDA food program, which is probably subsidized in some way by funds that the school can collect by signing up enough people to pick up food. There are blood drives and fundraisers and every club you join has a budget and they're selling donuts to raise money for their coffers, and it never ends.
At the end of the day I would just feel exhausted from the constant marketing. You know how a constant stream of ads feels, on TV or on a web page? It just wears you out and wears you down. Sometimes you feel like you're ready to just click that "Buy" button to make it stop, but it doesn't stop.
There was an honor society, PTK, which is of course a giant service organization so they are thirsty for lots of volunteers. Their pitch is that you can get scholarships through them. I sat through a presentation where this lady claimed she got $3 million dollars in scholarships... for community college? What the hell do you spend $3 million on in community college? A gold-plated supercomputer?
So for me, attending community college as an adult just shattered any illusion I had that it was an academic bastion of higher learning. It was simply a differently-shaped temple to worship the Almighty Buck. I am thankful that I exited when I did. If academic institutions expect us to respect them again, then they will need to undergo drastic reform and reorientation into halls of learning. Somehow.
Why would you expect your community college to feel like a "bastion of higher learning"? Why would you so stridently extrapolate your beef with your particular experience as somehow reflecting poorly on all colleges and universities in the US? I don't even think it reflects poorly on all community colleges, let alone full universities.
No, I think I have a fairly unique perspective, in that I've experienced both community college and four-year universities (perhaps in reverse order from the typical experience) and I've found them all to be more like factory farms than places of higher learning (by the way, "higher learning" is an epithet commonly applied to post-secondary education such as is found in community colleges, so you're arguing rather vigorously against community colleges acting as community colleges should act.)
My father was employed at a four-year university until his retirement, and my decision to apply to that place was greatly influenced by that fact. One of the things that happened just before my matriculation was the construction of a new and very expensive student center. We mocked it particularly for its exorbitant prices. It had a pizza restaurant and other "food court" type offerings, and it had a very shiny retail bookstore, as student centers typically do. Of course, in building and promoting this new center, the university decisively deprecated the "old" center which had so much character and had been a hub of activity for decades.
Yeah I don't believe for a minute that I had a unique or unusual experience feeling like a cow that is being milked for every penny while on campus. This feeling has greatly outweighed any feeling of being an empty vessel into which knowledge is being poured. Ask the commenters on HN, and they will tell you that universities aren't for learning a trade, they're for networking and entrance into a particular social class. The nature of that networking and social class is slightly different for community colleges, but not qualitatively.
> STEM and Business majors are very likely to pay off, even with high college costs.
An arts/humanities graduate who attended a private school (and had average costs of attendance) has roughly 50/50 odds that the net present value of their college investment will be positive.
I rapidly arrived at the feeling that I was a product, that I was an object to be monetized. I felt like every minute I spent on campus was an opportunity for someone or something to extract value from me. It's long been a meme that credit card banks will set up booths during the first weeks of classes, to lure in students on too-good-to-be-true introductory rate plans. This is true and more. There are creepy little handmade flyers tucked innocuously into a corner which promise gift cards to students who'll participate in medical research studies. There are bookstores and food stores and food carts and vending machines. There are sandwich boards advertising classes and tours and things.
There are even handouts of free stuff, such as the USDA food program, which is probably subsidized in some way by funds that the school can collect by signing up enough people to pick up food. There are blood drives and fundraisers and every club you join has a budget and they're selling donuts to raise money for their coffers, and it never ends.
At the end of the day I would just feel exhausted from the constant marketing. You know how a constant stream of ads feels, on TV or on a web page? It just wears you out and wears you down. Sometimes you feel like you're ready to just click that "Buy" button to make it stop, but it doesn't stop.
There was an honor society, PTK, which is of course a giant service organization so they are thirsty for lots of volunteers. Their pitch is that you can get scholarships through them. I sat through a presentation where this lady claimed she got $3 million dollars in scholarships... for community college? What the hell do you spend $3 million on in community college? A gold-plated supercomputer?
So for me, attending community college as an adult just shattered any illusion I had that it was an academic bastion of higher learning. It was simply a differently-shaped temple to worship the Almighty Buck. I am thankful that I exited when I did. If academic institutions expect us to respect them again, then they will need to undergo drastic reform and reorientation into halls of learning. Somehow.