Community Colleges are Underappreciated

A few years ago, I talked about the issue with how graduation rates are calculated. Community colleges have long been criticized for having low graduation rates. The problem is that many CC students have no interest in completing an associate's degree, so they transfer to a 4-year program before graduating from the CC. My educated guess was also that CC students transfer a lot more often than for-profit college students because most of them are probably already at a school that offers 4-year degrees. This turns out to be true based on research released last year.

When you track students longer and find out who eventually earns a bachelor's degree, CC students have substantially higher graduation rates than for-profit college students even though they have similar student bodies. For-profit college students also don't transfer nearly as often as CC students, so tracking for-profit college students who eventually graduate elsewhere leads to little improvement in the sector's graduation rate.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/31/upshot/revised-data-shows-community-colleges-have-been-underappreciated.html

 

Two out of four of our children attended community college before transferring to a university.
The CC is well respected here and known for the achievements of the students with good placement in to further higher education.
The general opinion is that the college is dominated by Asian students who pull the achievement up.