Not “snakeoil” per say; employers will care about your history of education: but as an aspiring computer engineer currently in CC looking to move to a university, I’ve learned exactly 0 useful things at community college. Outside of the piece of paper you get at the end, it’s all useless busywork, testing how much bullshit you can put up with. Everything useful I’ve learned in life has been for free, provided kindly by passionate communities. Hopefully this changes in university.
I think the value employers place in modern education in the United States is snakeoil, however.
I’ve learned exactly 0 useful things at community college.
Funnily enough, this is why I left my university and went to a CC. The opportunities for me at a CC have been much greater (especially when it comes to part-time employment positions). The smaller course sizes in my digital design classes in Quartus Prime (which were not present in the lower division curriculum at my original university) allowed me to excel so much that I ended up as a TA for my class. In addition, because I wasn’t asphyxiating myself in a tiny auditorium of 400 people, I found it much easier to approach my professors 1 on 1 to talk about physics outside my course curriculum, which has helped me network and prepare to line up REUs next year. I feel as though the people at my CC are also more down to earth and hardworking than those at my university. The student leadership there didn’t feel as daunting, and felt action-oriented (as opposed to being a pure popularity contest), so I was able to join student government. What I have been achieving over the course of 6 months at a CC is infinitely better than what I was getting at a full university, and I am no longer depressed.
Everyone’s experience is different. In my case, my original university was highly hyped, and very expensive, but left me sorely disappointed, and I was not happy with what I’d be learning according to my course roadmap.
I definitely learned useful things in community college – at least in so far as general education courses can be considered useful. There were some duds, of course. However, I don’t feel like I got much more out of university classes of the same level.
With that being said, you may just have the misfortune of attending a lackluster school.
Almost 30 years into my career as a software engineer, I’m now making a computer game that takes place in Space and were planets and comets follow Orbital Mechanics, so I’m using stuff I learned at Uni all those years ago in Degree-level Physics, since I went to university to study Physics (though later changed to an EE degree and ended up going to work as a software developer after graduating because that’s what I really liked to do).
I’ve also had opportunity to use stuff I learned in the EE degree for software engineering, the most interesting of which was using my knowledge of microprocessor design during the time I was designing high performance distributed systems for Investment Banks.
(I’ve also used that EE knowledge in making Embedded Systems - because I can do both the hardware and the software sides - though that was just for fun)
Also, pretty much through my career, I would often end up using University-level Mathematics, for example in banking it tended to be stuff like statistics, derivatives and integrals (including numerical approach methods) whilst game-making is heavy on trigonometry, vectors and matrices.
So even though I never formally learned Software Engineering at University, the stuff from the actual STEM degrees I attended (the one were I started - Physics - and the one I ended up graduating in - Electronics Engineering) were actually useful in it, sometimes in surprising ways.
At the very least just the Maths will be the difference between being pretty mediocre or actually knowing what you’re doing in more advanced domains that are heavy users of Technology: I would’ve been pretty lost at making software systems for the business of Equity Derivatives Trading if I didn’t know Statistics, Derivatives, Integrals and Numerical Approach Methods and ditto when making GPU shaders for 3D games if I didn’t know Trigonometry, Vectors and Matrices.
And this is without going into just understanding stuff I hear about but are currently not using, such as Neural Networks which are used in things like ChatGPT, and Statistics are invaluable in punching through most of the “common sense” bullshit spouted by politicians and other people played to deceive the general public.
Absolutely, you can be a coder, even a good one, without degree level education, but for the more advanced stuff you’ll need at least the degree level Maths even if a lot of the rest of your degree will likely be far less useful or useless.
So I got my AA at community college and my bachelors in computer engineering at a university. Other then math and physics there wasn’t a ton of useful classes in CC.
But if you are going to an ABET accredited school (or similar if outside north america) you are going to learn a lot in university.
You should learn how to analyze basic RLC circuits. How semiconductors work at a atomic level. How to design basic transistor circuits. Logic gates both design and analysis. Flipflops (the simplest computer). Computer architecture. A programming language or two and some basic assembly. How to use an oscope, logic probe, and multi meter. Basic digital signal processing, fourier transform, and linear controls.
There is a ton to learn and it’s not stuff you can just pickup on the job.
This is very specific to your industry. Community Colleges are great for a lot of people.
What you’re saying does not apply to Community Colleges only. It could apply to Universities with Computer Science departments. Granted, you’d learn more than 0 things in Universities; but for most of the stuff that’s required in tech companies, yup, you could learn them for free online, given enough determination.
Not “snakeoil” per say; employers will care about your history of education: but as an aspiring computer engineer currently in CC looking to move to a university, I’ve learned exactly 0 useful things at community college. Outside of the piece of paper you get at the end, it’s all useless busywork, testing how much bullshit you can put up with. Everything useful I’ve learned in life has been for free, provided kindly by passionate communities. Hopefully this changes in university.
I think the value employers place in modern education in the United States is snakeoil, however.
Funnily enough, this is why I left my university and went to a CC. The opportunities for me at a CC have been much greater (especially when it comes to part-time employment positions). The smaller course sizes in my digital design classes in Quartus Prime (which were not present in the lower division curriculum at my original university) allowed me to excel so much that I ended up as a TA for my class. In addition, because I wasn’t asphyxiating myself in a tiny auditorium of 400 people, I found it much easier to approach my professors 1 on 1 to talk about physics outside my course curriculum, which has helped me network and prepare to line up REUs next year. I feel as though the people at my CC are also more down to earth and hardworking than those at my university. The student leadership there didn’t feel as daunting, and felt action-oriented (as opposed to being a pure popularity contest), so I was able to join student government. What I have been achieving over the course of 6 months at a CC is infinitely better than what I was getting at a full university, and I am no longer depressed.
Everyone’s experience is different. In my case, my original university was highly hyped, and very expensive, but left me sorely disappointed, and I was not happy with what I’d be learning according to my course roadmap.
I definitely learned useful things in community college – at least in so far as general education courses can be considered useful. There were some duds, of course. However, I don’t feel like I got much more out of university classes of the same level.
With that being said, you may just have the misfortune of attending a lackluster school.
Almost 30 years into my career as a software engineer, I’m now making a computer game that takes place in Space and were planets and comets follow Orbital Mechanics, so I’m using stuff I learned at Uni all those years ago in Degree-level Physics, since I went to university to study Physics (though later changed to an EE degree and ended up going to work as a software developer after graduating because that’s what I really liked to do).
I’ve also had opportunity to use stuff I learned in the EE degree for software engineering, the most interesting of which was using my knowledge of microprocessor design during the time I was designing high performance distributed systems for Investment Banks.
(I’ve also used that EE knowledge in making Embedded Systems - because I can do both the hardware and the software sides - though that was just for fun)
Also, pretty much through my career, I would often end up using University-level Mathematics, for example in banking it tended to be stuff like statistics, derivatives and integrals (including numerical approach methods) whilst game-making is heavy on trigonometry, vectors and matrices.
So even though I never formally learned Software Engineering at University, the stuff from the actual STEM degrees I attended (the one were I started - Physics - and the one I ended up graduating in - Electronics Engineering) were actually useful in it, sometimes in surprising ways.
At the very least just the Maths will be the difference between being pretty mediocre or actually knowing what you’re doing in more advanced domains that are heavy users of Technology: I would’ve been pretty lost at making software systems for the business of Equity Derivatives Trading if I didn’t know Statistics, Derivatives, Integrals and Numerical Approach Methods and ditto when making GPU shaders for 3D games if I didn’t know Trigonometry, Vectors and Matrices.
And this is without going into just understanding stuff I hear about but are currently not using, such as Neural Networks which are used in things like ChatGPT, and Statistics are invaluable in punching through most of the “common sense” bullshit spouted by politicians and other people played to deceive the general public.
Absolutely, you can be a coder, even a good one, without degree level education, but for the more advanced stuff you’ll need at least the degree level Maths even if a lot of the rest of your degree will likely be far less useful or useless.
Algorithm engineering is also quite useful
So I got my AA at community college and my bachelors in computer engineering at a university. Other then math and physics there wasn’t a ton of useful classes in CC.
But if you are going to an ABET accredited school (or similar if outside north america) you are going to learn a lot in university.
You should learn how to analyze basic RLC circuits. How semiconductors work at a atomic level. How to design basic transistor circuits. Logic gates both design and analysis. Flipflops (the simplest computer). Computer architecture. A programming language or two and some basic assembly. How to use an oscope, logic probe, and multi meter. Basic digital signal processing, fourier transform, and linear controls.
There is a ton to learn and it’s not stuff you can just pickup on the job.
Keep at it and good luck.
Classic computer science thingy. You learn nothing at all there if you already passionately learn programming
This is very specific to your industry. Community Colleges are great for a lot of people.
What you’re saying does not apply to Community Colleges only. It could apply to Universities with Computer Science departments. Granted, you’d learn more than 0 things in Universities; but for most of the stuff that’s required in tech companies, yup, you could learn them for free online, given enough determination.
Which communities, I would like to know more.