[QUOTE="clayron"][QUOTE="gameguy6700"][QUOTE="bruinfan617"]
I don't get why more people don't do this. Is it pride?
Transferring to another school usually means you lose credits for classes in the process, and this is especially true for classes taken at a community or junior college. I've heard of people losing over half their credits when they transferred from a two year to a four university.Also, if you're planning on going to a professional or graduate school after undergrad it's in your best interests to go to a four year university as they offer a lot more opportunities for people on those tracks. For example, if you want to pursue a PhD in science (or an MD, PharmD, PsyD, etc.) you need to have meaningful research experience which you're not going to get at most community colleges. While you certainly can get experience after you transfer to a four year research university you're still not in an ideal position since a guy who's been working in a lab since freshman year will have twice as much experience when applying to grad school and likely much more impressive achievements (takes a long time to do research that results in a thesis, much less a journal article). Then there's the issue of getting to know faculty well enough for recommendation letters (most grad/professional schools want something like 3-5 letters).
Also, four year state universities are always an option too and they're usually better than a community college. They're also usually pretty cheap if you go in-state, and a lot of states have scholarships that let you attend any university in the state for free as long as you got a good GPA in high school and keep it up in college. So going to a community college just to pay less money doesn't make much sense when you consider that state universities aren't much more expensive, if they're even more expensive at all.
Your first paragraph is not true at all. It depends on the school's articulation's agreement with the college s/he is transferring to. If you are choosing to go to a school that your community college does not have an articulation agreement with then, yes, you will lose your credits. At the same time that is not the fault of the school or the transfer process its the fault of the student for not checking the feasibility of the transfer. Certain schools accept certain classes from certain schools - this is even true for classes that are transferred from one 4-year to another.
Also, there are very, very, very few freshmen who get real lab experience in their first few semesters. In that time most students are doing nothing more than entry level or general education work. In addition to that, community college offer the same lab prep work. Most "meaningful" lab experience comes from upper division work which a person would reason in their last 2 years at university - not in the first two. Also, many, if not all, professors from a community college have a PhD and relevant work experience - many choose to teach at smaller schools due to class sizes, interactions with student and staff, and time constraints. So receiving a recommendation letter from a professor of a field, regardless of the institute, is always an excellent thing. I have a professor from my 4-year university that teaches community college during the summer. It doesn't reduce the quality of the professor.
The argument that 4-years aren't much more expensive than a community college is a joke. I went to a community college where it was $21/unit, the university I transferred to was $1100+/unit. That is a substantial difference. I went to an instate college.
My first two years I went to a decent public university that cost $4000 a semester (or maybe it was $4000 per year. I do remember that for out-of-state tuition you had to pay $16,000 so there was quite a discrepancy between the two). Not that I ever paid a penny of that since I had a full ride scholarship from the state that made it free (and all I had to do to get said scholarship was get at least a 3.5 GPA in high school, although I believe there was a smaller scholarship also available for people who got at least a 3.0 so it's not like it was difficult to get). The top 20 private university I go to now costs about $900 per credit (assuming you take a full load which here is 22 hours or about five classes since here most classes get you 4 credit hours; at 18 hours it comes out to $1100), so congrats on managing to find and attend a public university that cost as much as, if not more than, one of the most expensive and top ranked private universities in the country. And extra congrats for somehow managing to fail to get in-state tuition at said in-state public university (or at least I would hope you failed to get in-state tuition since if that truly was in-state tuition then the out-of-state tuition must have been criminal). As for the part about lab experience, no one cares about the "lab experience" you do in intro science courses. I'm talking about independent, project-oriented research. The kind I was doing my first semester of sophomore year (would have started the second semester of freshman year but decided that the project I would have done wouldn't have really related to my major so I opted not to do it). Like you say, most people wait until their last year of university to do that sort of thing. By no coincidence, most people also don't get into grad school. Starting in junior year is alright, and obviously a person coming in from a CC would be starting then, but they'd have to get into a lab at their university ASAP so that combined with the lost two years would make things harder. Not impossible, but harder. Why make things more difficult for yourself if you don't have to? My point about recommendation letters wasn't that a CC professor is a bad reference to get, but rather that splitting your education up between two institutions makes it difficult to interact with the same professors long enough to get more than a generic rec letter from them. I'm speaking from personal experience here as someone who transferred schools. Really the only thing that's going to save my ass is the fact that I can make my honor's thesis committee as large as I want which is pretty much a "write down how many rec letters you want here" ticket. As for transferring credits, yes, if your CC has a deal set up with other colleges in the state the credits should transfer easily (although this is usually only true for public universities). But if you want to go to a private university or a university located outside of the state you could run into some issues. Yes, this is true for any transfer, but people coming from CC's and junior colleges tend to have more credit loss than those coming from other four year institutions.
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