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> Drastically reduce the number of Freshman and Sophomore students and aggressively recruit potential graduates through the Community College systems nationwide.

Doing a 2-year stint at a community college is just about one of the most sane things a person can do. At the end, you still end up with a bachelor's degree from whatever university you finish at, indistinguishable from any other graduate. And you do it typically at a fraction of the cost. Oh, and often community colleges focus on teachers with industry experience, meaning that you're not learning about software engineering from a computer science academic that's never actually been a software engineer.

I've seen the other side of this -- I taught at West Podunk Community College for a year. Their quaity control on instructors was not great. I know, because I was 22, with a very fresh B.S. in Computer Engineering, hired to teach C++. Neither the administration nor I had fathomed the depth of my ignorance when it came to C++. (Although this was 2001 and there was an order of magnitude less to C++ than there is now. It had only just been standardized!) I did badly enough my first semester that one of the students asked for his money back. After that I realized I needed to go lighter on OO, turned things around and managed to teach a relatively sane subset of C++ in the spring and summer.

The students, on the other hand, were great. Some of them were professionals trying to learn a new skill. Others were saving money on the first two years of school. Fully a third were Chinese, trying to establish a U.S. academic record. They sat in the back and the students who understood me would translate for the ones who didn't. The translators generally did very well. At the end of the year, when I moved on to other things, I had gained a huge amount of respect for community college students.

Community colleges and the students they serve deserve more resources so they can stop hiring clueless 22-year-olds.

Doing a 2-year stint at a community college is just about one of the most sane things a person can do.

Really? I know how introductory courses are taught at the local community college, and there's the MIT/Berkeley/whatnot lectures online. It's a difference between day and night! Of course you can watch the Youtube lecture instead of the tripe they feed you at the c.c. but you do miss out on interaction with fellow students and professors. This means missing out on a lot.

I did 2 years at community college [1], and it was great for me. At the community college level, calculus 3 and calculus based physics classes were small and there was a lot of instructor time. At a larger university, calculus and early physics are often large lecture classes, which can be more challenging to learn in.

Some community colleges are better than others, so if your plan is to go to community college for two years and then transfer, it's a good idea to go to one that has a high transfer rate, even better if it has curriculum alignment with the school you transfer to. I ended up doing 3 years after transfer because I also changed majors, and didn't get into the school I wanted to transfer to, but I had completed almost all of my general education credits, so I could concentrate on the major classes.

[1] http://www.orangecoastcollege.edu (if it matters)

I went to community college for two years. I'm at Stanford now, previously Berkeley. I don't feel like I missed out on much by going to a CC, except debt.

[shrugs]

The experience at my department at Tumbleweed State University is that those who transfer from Tumbleweed Community College struggle. YMMW.

I tend to agree with verisimilidude that that's mostly driven by those students being the type of person who goes to Tumbleweed Community College, and that if you expelled everyone from Tumbleweed Community College and conscripted a bunch of students from, say, UNC Chapel Hill, they'd be fine.

In other words, while CC students are a very low-quality population, your personal outcomes are unlikely to be dramatically affected by where you choose to go. The bad outcomes of CC students reflect selection bias, not a treatment effect of the community colleges.

Anecdotally (albeit from multiple sources), the scholastic bar for a CC transfer is lower than that of a HS to 4 year college route.

GP was likely someone who could have passed the HS to University bar without having to go the CC route to increase his or her odds.

Personally, I advise younger friends or international transfer type students to consider the CC->University track especially if they are naturally bright but didn't get the marks needed to pass the direct enrollment route.

I've known several Chinese students with very low SAT scores (because of the English sections). Your advice for international students is reasonable but possibly not necessary. Of the best three that I knew well:

- One had her heart set on attending a UC school. I particularly recommended applying to a california community college because of their low standards and strong UC admissions preference. Her SAT scores were somewhere in the 1400s (out of 2400), but she was admitted to UC Davis directly.

- One had an SAT score in the 1700s, far and away the best of her cohort. She applied (and was accepted) to University of Minnesota Twin Cities, and is quite happy there.

- One had an SAT score in the 1300s (in my opinion the smartest of the three), and, in what was to me a shocking move, applied to and enrolled at a University of Alabama (I don't know which one -- USNews lists several). But she transferred from there to Georgia Tech.

Universities seem to be aware that SAT verbal scores are poorly reflective of foreign students' actual abilities, and they really like the inflated international tuition.

> GP was likely someone who could have passed the HS to University bar without having to go the CC route to increase his or her odds.

That's true. I was accepted to Berkeley, among other top schools, straight out of high school. I chose to go to community college. The point being: going to a CC did not negatively impact my personal outcome, and should not be discouraged as an option when it can benefit a driven student.

> 2. Perform genuine, rigorous auditing of participating in NCAA sports for cost-benefit analysis and completely shut down programs which do not recoup or actually cost money.

As far as I understand things, this would be grossly illegal -- Title IX is interpreted to require schools to devote equal budgets to men's sports and to women's sports, but women's sports can't earn any money back. You could just charge that against the men's sports, but you might end up canceling really popular sports, like basketball.

Um, I didn't say anything about distinction between Men's and Women's sports and I didn't intend to do any such thing.

I meant look at the entire participation within the NCAA. That means both Men's & Women's and if the overall analysis is that participating is barely a break-even proposition or actually loses money, then shut all of the sports expenditures down. Popularity doesn't always correspond to profitability and that should be scrutinized if discussing "saving money" in higher education.

The author is assuming that universities want to rein in the costs in the first place. Universities are a business, and just like any other business, why would they want to make as little money as possible? Their main goal is to give students an education, while also making as much money as possible.