In my state, most of the programs the community colleges offer are aimed either at credential acquisition or for transfer to a university; there are no four year programs. However, many of the teachers at these schools are also PhDs moonlighting from local universities where they teach upper-level subjects and the community college offers a handful of classes that are at the 300/junior level for certain subjects. The thing that's really missing from the community college curriculum that would shake up the university pricing model is the ability to get a Bachelor's degree. At least in my state, it doesn't seem like there would be too much of a stretch to accommodate the additional educational resources it would require. Some people go to a university because they want access to first-class facilities, professors, student networking, and the like. In fact, the tuition at my local university more than doubled after they managed to get their basketball team into the NCAA Final Four one year. But many people don't care about this kind of thing; they just need their 'certificate of passage of this particular social ritual'.

Comparing tuition at Cabrillo College (community college for Santa Cruz, CA) and SJSU (California State University in San Jose), it looks like a "normal" course costs $574 at the bottom-tier 4-year university vs $230 at the community college. If you take 2 or fewer classes in a semester at SJSU (as a full-time student, you're supposed to take 5), tuition falls nearly in half to $333 per class.

$6000 tuition per year is high enough to be prohibitive for some people. But those people are the focus of intensive recruitment and financial aid efforts by universities all up and down the hierarchy of status. That isn't the first place I'd look if I were seeking to answer "why aren't more poor people going to college?"

I agree they're relatively cheap, but I think they could go a lot further and just be free. A few hundred dollars for a class is still a lot, and we all benefit from people being able to get educated.

Community colleges don’t offer much value. Even a few hundred dollars is way over priced because the degree won’t open hiring doors except in an extremely narrow set of jobs, like nursing and related care-giving - which would be better off as a standalone trade school.

The value of a college degree is networking and the brand name recognition that the university has, which opens doors when your resume is churning through automated recruiting systems.

Nobody expects that you exit college with training, skill or knowledge to be an effective employee, beyond basic life skills and vague understanding of how to comply with professional standards.

Using college to actually learn stuff is down to a personal preference. You absolutely don’t need to spend time that way, but you can get extra value if you choose to.

But the bulk of the intended value is to give yourself branding and signaling for marketability in employment.

You can think of a college degree similar to a “certified organic” label on food. It doesn’t really mean anything, but you’d be a complete moron to misjudge the fact that everyone else will believe it does mean something and shift all kinds of economic facts of life around that entrenched, generational belief, and use lobbyists, regulatory capture and media to constantly reinforce that stranglehold.

Community colleges offer value to people like myself, who for whatever reason did not succeed in high school and would have no other access to higher education (and perhaps couldn't afford it even if they did). In my case, a few semesters of good grades allowed me to transfer to a state university that I was previously rejected from, and with a scholarship that allowed me to be able to afford it in the first place. I was then able to leverage the benefits of the networking you refer to, and was able to drop out and become a well paid programmer rather than a perpetually broke student who wasn't even learning much because I had to work full time to be able to attend in the first place.

>You can think of a college degree similar to a “certified organic” label on food. It doesn’t really mean anything

Not sure where you're from, but in the US this is not true at all. There are strict requirements for something to be certified organic. As of 10 years ago when I last worked on a farm, it was actually quite difficult to get certified.

That’s a valid point. If you can use the community college to transfer to a school with a brand name, it can help a wider variety of people be able to get to that brand name school.

My comment is only in reference to fully completing your degree and getting a diploma that goes on your resume from a community college. You’re better off skipping college and going straight to work in that scenario.

Where my family is from in the Midwest, this is very common. People who get paid more and rise to management jobs in the local blue collar workforce are the ones who just start in the stockroom or doing admin work right out of high school (or otherwise make careers in factory work, trades like welding or go to the military).

They make more money and have higher ranks than people with community college degrees working the same jobs because they have so much lead time in years of experience, while the positions rarely if ever need or care about college degrees.

Meanwhile, other than specific trades which are basically only nursing and elder care, community college grads cannot compete with state school grads for positions that do require degrees, like work in local government, upper positions in law enforcement, teaching at local schools, etc. Community college will never get you those jobs.

I’ve seen a lot of people banking on community college degrees opening doors for them thinking it’s the same as a state school degree but lets you save money & live at home. They end up still with small amounts of debt and absolutely nothing to show for it job-wise.

Really the only exception is if you transfer to a brand name school and you can ensure the degree you’ll have carries brand name signalling.