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0 pointsvanilla_nut4y ago0 comments

If you happen to live near a decent community college, this isn’t a bad idea. But I know a lot of people who did 2 years at community college, and then got screwed over by transfer credits enough that they ended up doing 3 years at a normal college. So the savings isn’t quite ideal. I actually went to community college instead of a senior year at high school, and think you should really inspect the quality of the programs at your community college before trying this. For instance, my community college only had a couple of token CS classes, and they basically taught C++ in a C-style (all declarations at the top of the file, no object orientation) as the only style of programming. Not a great way to get a head start on a CS degree. But the math, humanities, science, and social science programs could probably give you a very cheap head start on those degrees.

For the truly frugal student, I would probably recommend something like what I did: take community college or AP classes aplenty in your senior year. Go straight to a college that has the best program for your interests (keeping in mind your interests may change). Graduating in three years is easy enough if you have a semester’s worth of transfer credits for gen eds, and classes like calculus and linear algebra in particular are really easy to cover before you go to college. Administration will probably try to make graduating early as hard as possible, but they really won’t be able to stop you if you have the credits already.

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_moof4y ago

A lot of community colleges have comprehensive transfer agreements with four-year schools in the same city and/or state. You can generally avoid getting screwed on transfers if you do a little research.

balls1874y ago

> But I know a lot of people who did 2 years at community college, and then got screwed over by transfer credits enough that they ended up doing 3 years at a normal college

This was the case for me, though I wouldn't classify as being "screwed."

I attended a private tech school, and they were upfront they would not accept credits for any engineering program pre-reqs (Math, Chem, CS, Tech Comm, etc). However, they would accept "humanities" credits an apply them to any electives required for our chosen degree.

Luckily, I had participated in our schools "running start" so I earned those credits while in high school, and my only intention of taking math at the time was to fulfill my highschool math requirements. I did also take 2-years of mandarin, which my school gladly accepted and counted towards my electives.

All that being said, in Washington state, all publicly funded schools must accept all credits from Community Colleges, AND guarantee admission, so if you are a student looking to attend a state school in Washington state, community college is a very attractive route.