Community Colleges Advantages

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Going to college has become the new trend and its attendance has been increasing for quite some time now. Everybody is doing it—yes, that includes women, minorities, and all social classes. In the United States, we have a variety of college types that can be attended for all different types of people and educational opportunities. What I am going to discuss is if there is really a “better option” of the type of school everyone should be aiming to go to. Which college, a community college, for-profit school, or four-year university, will take a student farther in life and give the most benefits (graduation and a degree)? From the research, I have concluded that out of the three types of schools—community colleges, for-profit schools, and …show more content…
Community colleges are much cheaper than other colleges and they offer specific job preparation. They are also located in relatively close area to where a student would live so you do not have to live on campus and if you have a job or other duties you can take many classes that fit your schedule. Also, these students who graduate for a specific vocation do receive substantial economic payoffs compared to a high school student (Dougherty, p. 405). In the end, the community college can be a great tool to quickly get a degree and go into a profession that you have been trained in but only if the person sticks to their studies and finishes their program. Their competition, though, is what makes them the lesser of the three college …show more content…
“Way back when” four year colleges were only to be attended by white, Anglo-Saxon, protestant men. University admissions have since diversified itself in the categories of race, gender, and socioeconomic status (but this one is a little incongruent to the others). In Karabel’s work, “The Battle Over Merit,” he writes of the “Big Three”—Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. In this response I would like to use what Karabel has to say towards four year universities because they have many similarities, although that have a different tuition (but four year university tuition is much more expensive than any community college so I think it is safe to generalize with the Big Three and regular four year universities). Karabel writes about who can attend these big universities and how the many who are attending are the ones who can pay for it. College is expensive. The students attending four-year universities must either have the money or be able to pay off loans (or get a scholarship, which is no easy feat). With this being said, the lower socioeconomic class is not representing many times at these four-year universities because they simply cannot afford it. Karabel writes that the main attendees of the Big Three are from privileged families and alumni parent many. Families in the bottom 50% are at a severe

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