Our education system is going down the drain...

[63dot]

Very true. I agree with you there. I have been in community college classes that truly kick my ass and at the same time took classes at a 4 year intuitions that I slept threw and got an A in.

That is what I love about community college in the sense that I can always find something that will kick my butt. Those are the classes I learn from.

While in high school I did afternoons at the CC, while a university student I did summers at the CC, as a university graduate I still took classes at the CC, and as a graduate student I still went and took a lot of classes at the CC.

The CC here is geared both for high school grads who are 17 or 18 starting as college freshmen, all the way to seasoned professionals who may have a master's degree (let's say in computer science, information systems, or mathematics) but want to shore up their career skills by going to the CC Cisco Networking Academy.

The diversity of professors at my CC is amazing from traditional PhDs who have spent their whole life in education, to Naval Academy professors, to practitioners in their field (such as attorneys, accountants, and a sitting Congressman who may not have the PhD and dissertation and tenure, but are equally valuable to the school).

 

[iShater]

I had my first session for a class at a CC last night. Tons of stuff going to be crammed into it, the teacher has a good background (and I have had him before a couple of years ago).

The "quality" of the students though is another story. Quite sad actually.

 

[steve2112]

That is what I love about community college in the sense that I can always find something that will kick my butt. Those are the classes I learn from.

While in high school I did afternoons at the CC, while a university student I did summers at the CC, as a university graduate I still took classes at the CC, and as a graduate student I still went and took a lot of classes at the CC.

The CC here is geared both for high school grads who are 17 or 18 starting as college freshmen, all the way to seasoned professionals who may have a master's degree (let's say in computer science, information systems, or mathematics) but want to shore up their career skills by going to the CC Cisco Networking Academy.

The diversity of professors at my CC is amazing from traditional PhDs who have spent their whole life in education, to Naval Academy professors, to practitioners in their field (such as attorneys, accountants, and a sitting Congressman who may not have the PhD and dissertation and tenure, but are equally valuable to the school).

It really is amazing what you wind up with as instructors. I don't know about other states, but in my state, the CCs have two paths. One is the traditional academic side, with things like English comp, history, etc. The other side is technical/vocational education. On the technical side, the instructors were required to have a certain amount of practical experience in the field before they could teach. They also had lower academic requirements to teach, so you could have someone with a bachelor's degree and 10 years experience teaching instead of a master's with zero experience. This policy did produce some interesting instructors.

As far as the students: In the technical side, many of the students were the "non-traditional" students. I was in my late 20s when I started. We had one lady in my program who was a retired industrial engineer starting a new career. We had several others who were considered non-traditional.

 

[MyDesktopBroke]

I highlighted a possible problem. You need to do your research before enrolling into community colleges.

My first school of any kind was a CC. I was very impressed by the standards they held their teachers to. I think many CC students get a bad rep - there's a lot of bad stigma around them.

I did summer classes there and we would get tons of students from "real" colleges looking for "easy" credits on stuff like statistics. Most of them crashed and burned during the first test and left.


But yes, despite having excellent teachers and mostly good classmates, you will always get at least a few students who take advantage of the ease that you get into a CC.

 

[63dot]

It really is amazing what you wind up with as instructors. I don't know about other states, but in my state, the CCs have two paths. One is the traditional academic side, with things like English comp, history, etc. The other side is technical/vocational education. On the technical side, the instructors were required to have a certain amount of practical experience in the field before they could teach. They also had lower academic requirements to teach, so you could have someone with a bachelor's degree and 10 years experience teaching instead of a master's with zero experience. This policy did produce some interesting instructors.

As far as the students: In the technical side, many of the students were the "non-traditional" students. I was in my late 20s when I started. We had one lady in my program who was a retired industrial engineer starting a new career. We had several others who were considered non-traditional.

That's exactly how it's set up. Two of the Cisco Adademy professors have their BS degrees AND a Cisco certification. One of the teachers had a traditional computer science or telecommunications bachelor's and knew the stuff from college while the other man had a chemistry degree, but with his Cisco CCNP, he was more than qualified to teach the class.

As far as the traditional side of the college, most had their PhD or MA/MS degrees except for teachers who were exceptionally qualified without a traditional PdD or Masters and mandatory thesis or dissertation.

The Congressman had his BA and LL.B, and he was of course teaching about government from personal experience.

The other history teacher who came later also had here BA and LL.B and her latter degree gave her the equivalent to teach US government to a person who had, let's say an MA in US history, political science, or policy studies. This was the 70s and 80s but they would still get a job at the community college today. Plus I would rather have the real world experience of a long time lawyer than the other teacher (her husband, still a great teacher) who has his MA in political science.

The only teachers with a "single" bachelors degree who were full professors and department heads to boot, taught graphic design (because back then it was not common to find in an MFA graphic design graduate around here) and the auto shop professor and department head who had a mechanical engineer's BS as well as his industry related car mechanic's certification(s). Many of the graphic design students and automotive technology students came here right after high school and were 19 or 20 when they received their associate's degree.