It depends a lot on the community college. My wife has taught at community colleges and 4 year universities, and she said that the students who transferred from community colleges were frequently very unprepared for a 4 year university. Like, they would struggle to write more than 1 page and have no idea what citations are.
I think the parent comment is implying that college diplomas are better at helping people get a job and earn a living.
Writing 1+ page essays and MLA citation formatting is work that seems to only exist in academia. It wouldn't surprise me if community college educated people transferring to university programs needed a refresher on that stuff.
Writing 1+ page essays and MLA citation formatting is work that seems to only exist in academia.
Proper written communication and literature searching skills are demanded everywhere in the workplace. Doesn't everyone dread getting muddled, poorly formatted emails because you have to guess the meaning or write back and forth several times to find out what's going on?
I don't get the pervasive hostility to education and academia in this forum. Granted, much of high school and regional college is piss-poor, but instead of writing off all of university as useless one should demand proper performance.
Seems the experience is very different in differing work places.
> Doesn't everyone dread getting muddled, poorly formatted emails because you have to guess the meaning or write back and forth several times to find out what's going on?
This is the norm at my (very successful and large) company.
> I don't get the pervasive hostility to education and academia in this forum.
I'm very pro-education, but I will point out that all the people I know who write very poorly have formal education, and often graduate degrees. Culture will dictate how well you write much, much more than education. If the work culture doesn't value it, people will write poorly.
>Proper written communication and literature searching skills are demanded everywhere in the workplace.
Proper written communication, absolutely. However, you can argue that people don't need 4 years of writing essays in order to comprise emails or PowerPoints. As for literature searching, what does that mean in a normal office environment context?
My students have to write lab protocols. In General Chemistry class they were filling in worksheets (seriously, are they paying tuition to fill in worksheets?), now they get to write 8 - 10 pages for each organic lab about the context, what they did and what is all means. The initial attempts are universally lousy, but they do improve. One hopes that the improved writing skills carry over to other kinds of written communication. It's just sad that expectations in the first semesters are set so low, it's really a tyranny of low expectation.
Footnoting means to put stuff into proper context. Of course you need literature searching skills to put stuff into proper context, and you need to know where to find documentation for your field of work.
As someone who went to community college and is intimately familiar with transfer agreements with universities, this sounds like a problem with the curriculum agreement universities have with community colleges. It's something that gets reviewed annually and guarantees that certain courses transfer over as equivalent to specific university courses. If the expectations are mismatched on what was covered in those courses, then there wasn't a thorough enough assessment of equivalencies.
