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A guest commentary

Two-year college may be best starter for your student

Thursday, May 13, 2004

An 18-year-old is given a choice of high school graduation gifts: one of the new compact hybrid cars with automatic transmission and optional cargo carrier, or a 2004 ruby red convertible with a V-8 engine and four on the floor.

A no-brainer, right?

It's also very similar to the decisions many high school seniors are making this spring in choosing between the local community college or the big university downstate.

"No-brainer" may, in fact, be a literal description if the teen opts for the university over the two-year college as the place to launch his higher education.

That's because, like the shiny muscle car, the university is bigger, sexier and more famous, so that there's more prestige for you and your parents.

The fact that you have less value for nearly five times the cost is lost in the sheen of the ruby red clear coat and the polished chrome.

For if the product is education, it's delivered at the hallowed state university by teaching assistants in their early 20s possessed of only bachelor's degrees.

They have little or no teaching experience, and little or no time for your freshman son or daughter assigned to their classes of up to 300 students.

That's because the TAs themselves are stressed and stretched to the limits by the demands of lecture preparation time, and by the responsibilities for the classes they themselves are carrying in pursuit of a graduate degree.

But the teen starting out at an economical two-year college for typically $50 per credit hour sits in a classroom of 28 students with a fair chance of being taught by a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, the University of Chicago or from Princeton, all of whose hirings were based primarily on the quantity and quality of their teaching experience.

And they have oodles of office hours for lavishing time and attention on individual students because they're spared from the rigors of mandatory research.

How is that possible? Why is the obviously superior product being offered at a fraction of the cost, mere minutes from home?

It's the compact vs. the convertible, that's why.

With the former, your money goes for function and reliability, while with the latter, it's spent on looks and pizzazz.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that more and more college professors with advanced degrees are seeking positions at two-year schools since it's there that their love of teaching can be requited.

Meanwhile, at the university, the most money is squandered on celebrity researchers, scientists and award-winning authors, who give the institution sparkle and high marks for its rating in U.S. News and World Report, but who contribute little or nothing to the education of underclassmen.

The outcome is that a large number of university freshmen are lost in the crowd.

The distance from home, their first real taste of freedom and a fantasy world of thousands of others in their age group on an extended sleepover can lead to a year of zero college credits and a debt in the range of $10,000 to $25,000.

It's often a shameful, expensive and circuitous route back to the district two-year school where, in the meantime, the kid next door from the same graduating class is already a year ahead in credits and a year away from transfer to the four-year school, but at a price of about $2,000 dollars total.

He or she also has most likely benefited psychologically from a year's worth of experience in the real, workaday world.

There must be a catch, right?

Two-year college students must not do as well, or their futures can't be as bright, right?

Not according to a just released study by the U.S. Department of Education.

It determined that approximately 70 percent of students who attend a minimum of one semester at a two-year college go on to receive a four-year college degree.

That's the same percentage of students who start off at the four-year institution and obtain a degree.

The community college route "... is just as effective a way of getting a bachelor's degree if you do it the right way," reported education department analyst Clifford Adelman.

And at an ounce of cost.

Granted, a Prairie State College, a College of DuPage, a Gulf Shores Community College or a Daley College does not have the cachet of a Duke, a Purdue or a Mizzou.

It's why my own three children — in spite of my cajoling and bribes (I offered each of them a used Corolla) to start at the local community college — could not resist the sports car-like seduction of the big university.

But I finally got my wish in a roundabout way.

My middle child, the one with the Ph.D. from the University of Missouri and with imminent offers of tenure-track positions at national research universities, finally found her way to that local two-year school — as an assistant professor of English.

So if you make a wise choice and are a little bit lucky, your kid may just end up in her classroom.

David McGrath is a free-lance writer and professor of English at College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn. He lives in Oak Forest.