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Comp Sci Programs at Junior Colleges?
An anonymous reader asks: "What place does a Computer Science Department play in a Community College? I recently started taking classes out of an interest in learning new things and getting a few college credits toward my first degree. I come to find out (only 1 semester after I started) that none of these credits will transfer to a bachelor's degree at one of our state schools. Many of the courses here are 'applied technology' such as Linux Administration/Installation or Web programming with PHP, but the local University only accepts their own 'theory based' courses such as Data Structures, Theory of operating systems, and so forth. I was wondering where a community college fits in, has anyone seen a great community college program recently and if anyone knows how these programs are designed?"
Those 'applied technology' courses are IT courses. The 'theory based' courses are CS courses. That's usually a different department. You should ask the university if they offer IT courses and what is comparable to the ones in the community college. I know that in Maryland, the community colleges don't offer much in CS.
I don't know your state, but I know that in Maryland, the community colleges, colleges, and universities have a shared system. You are guaranteed that any course you take in a state community college will transfer to any state school (and most non-state schools too).
PHP programming and linux admin (or any kindof admin) are not computer science disciplines.
The things they want (data structures etc) are. A more abstract layer that can be practically applied in any programming language.
Computer science is, funnily enough, more about the science.
You seem surprised that computer science is theory based...I'm afraid (at least from my own degree and others in surrounding universities) it largely is. The programming parts are merely to allow a practical presentation of the theory learned.
They generally expect you to pick up languages by yourself (you may get a quick introduction your first semester but you'll probably be handed a book and told to go read) and whilst you will probably be taught a smattering of unix, it won't be from a sysadmin point of view it will be from an IPC / pipes / OS theory / thread handling slant.
I'm not from the USA so I can't comment on community college courses but I would suggest you double check the Computer Science courses you're looking at to ensure it is actually what you want to do...better now than getting there and realising it's not what you thought.
Kev
For students planning to go to 4-year schools, junior and community colleges offer what California schools call "general education" requirements: English, calculus, etc. Offering the type of CS class that a 4-year school would offer would be too specialized for them.
If your plan is to get a job right away learning skills you can pick up quickly, then that's what the CC CS classes are for. If you are looking for credits that will apply toward a bachelor's degree, they are probably in more general things like English, math, and science. In a community college, it is usually cheaper, and you get those things out of the way so you can focus on your major-related classes once you transfer.
Good luck!
what you're final goal is. If you're looking for a degree, then yes, check before hand if any credits you're getting will transfer over. However, if you're goal is a job, then you have to look at what the qualifications are for the jobs you're interested in. Do they require a university degree or will a technical type diploma suffice? Do you have experience?
I completed most of a University degree but got fed up with the fact that all I was learning was theory, I really had very little idea how computers worked and had next to no programming knowledge. I worked part time at a local computer store putting together and fixing PCs. I picked up a help desk contract and started doing a lot of learning on my own. I'm now in a fairly senior tehcnical position (actually, the next step up is management). The university classes didn't really help, except to network and learn from things other students did in their spare time. What helped me was experience and proof I did learning on my own.
Forget CS at the community college level. In today's world, you need a BS. Really, you need a Masters, but you can work on that later. Instead of thinking about an Associate CS "degree", think about getting a whole lot of prerequisites out of the way at a much lower per credit cost, than transfer to a respectable 4 year college and finish up with a decent BS.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Working in the IT arena for over 15 years at numerous companies and responsible for the hiring of resources for many of them, I can tell that you are probably better off taking the 'applied technology' (hands-on) courses. While a degree might help get you through the HR trolls, managers prefer experience and current/relevent industry certification.
Go for the degree if you want the piece of paper (and a well-rounded education), but remember that it won't guarantee you a job.
That said, other states do things differently: the cc system is specifically set up as a "feeder" to the larger public universities. In many cases, your 2 years at cc give you 2 years credit at the uni.
This may not help you, but to others, please check before hand about your local cc and transfer credits. We see lots of students who waste two years (of time and money) and get nothing at the next level.
I received a 2-year degree from a Massachusetts community college back in the early 90s, at a school which had tailored the program specifically for transfering to a 4-year school. They even had agreements with many schools such that as long as you had a 3.0 or higher GPA, you were guaranteed a transfer into the school.
... looks like my favorite professor is still hanging around there!
I was at Springfield Technical Community College, and transfered the degree to WPI, where I eventually ended up getting my MS in CS. I absolutely feel my 2 years at STCC were no handicap to me in my academic knowledge.
URLs:
List of transfer programs
CS Transfer Program
I actually feel I got an excellent grounding in CS from my introduction at the community college. I had, like you say, a Data Structures class. It was taught using C++, so I picked up some practical knowledge to go with the theory. Same with the introductory programming class, which used Pascal. Same with the machine language class, which had theory elements.
Basically I came out of the school with all the math I needed for a BS in CS (including linear algebra, DiffEQs, and discrete math), almost all of the science, and almost all of the humanities classes. I was a litle behind in CS theory classes, so when I got to WPI as a "Junior" I ended up enrolled in a couple "Sophomore" CS classes to catch up. It was really no big deal, and I had a little more practical knowledge than some of my classmates, too, because WPI at the time wasn't teaching C++ to its freshmen and sophomores.
Considering I saved, oh, maybe 15K+ each year by taking the first two years at a CC, I'm thrilled with how it worked out. Plus I could overload and take even more classes, at a cheaper cost per credit.
There's definitely a place for Community Colleges in science and engineering. You just need a program designed around it. Maybe your state has something similar....
Not representing or approved by my company or anybody else.
- Practical courses, e.g. DNS and BIND
- Current hottest technologies
- Immediate job skills
A university is about a foundation of theoretical knowledge. You don't go to university to be trained for a job, you go to learn the knowledge to understand a field. Universities offer:- Theory-based courses, e.g. Networking
- Exposure to good technologies, not necessarily the latest hottest thing
- Related knowledge, such as mathematics
- No specific job skills
At a university they won't teach you the specific skills you'll need to get a job. That does not mean you won't have job skills by the time you graduate. You're expected to learn the theory in class and learn the practical job-skill aspects on your own. If you aren't comfortable with that responsibility, a university degree is not for you.Absolute flamebait.
For example, check out this CS program at Springfield Technical Community College in Massachusetts. It's designed specifically to transfer into a 4-year CS degree and includes such "hard and specialized" topics as Discrete Math, Linear Algebra, Digital Logic, and Data Structures.
Sorry to say, but your gut instinct is completely incorrect in this instance.
I know because I went through that program, transfered to a 4-year school (WPI), and stuck around to get my Masters. And I wasn't the only one; several of my classmates in CS and other disciplines stuck out the two year transfer program and ended up graduating and are working in industry right now.
It can be done, and in some cases is a great way to bypass two expensive years at a 4-year school.
Not representing or approved by my company or anybody else.
I am going to a community college majoring in IT with a Unix/Linux concentration. I am finding that I wish I'd gone into another major, like graphic arts or English or something.
I basically did it because I figured since I'm a computer geek, I may as well get a degree in it. However, I've found that the IT program at my school sucks. 40% of the students have left the IT program in the last year. Most of the credits will not transfer to another school, so if I go to a CS program I might have to start from scratch. And I do want to study CS more than IT.
In retrospect, I am thinking I should have used the comm. college to broaden my horizons a bit before concentrating on getting a BS in my chosen field.
I don't mean any disrespect to them, but I suspect that the other departments are not as inferior to their 4-year school counterparts as the IT/CS departments at a CC. Perhaps majoring in something like math at a CC will help you in your quest for a BS. It would be more likely to transfer credits, anyways.
actually, it's my experience that most CS majors have significant background in it/programming before they even start university; it's this background that's often the driving force behind choosing CS
/bin/fortune | slashdotsig.sh
I teach part time at a community college and we have courses that transfer and courses that do not. The ones I teach all transfer to the big schools so students can save a bit of money getting the lower division course work out of the way. We work closely with the larger universities in the area to ensure that we cover all the required material so that our students are properly prepared when they transfer.
I dropped out of school in '96 (with a decent job, who needs stinkin' school!).
Then I was laid off in 2001 ("sorry, we don't hire non-college graduates")
So now I'm going back to the local Community College and will transfer to complete a Computer Information Systems degree at Cal State San Bernardino. From all the advice that I'm getting, everyone is saying that you should get an AA degree before leaving community college. The requirements change at the universities all the time so once you complete your AA degree they can't take away any of those classes that you completed.
--Ajay
"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes"
--Edsger Dijkstra
Basically, junior college CS programs aren't designed for the same thing as those in universities. Find out what general (and not-so-general) classes you'll need for prerequisites after transferring, and try to knock those out of the way.
At the JC I attended, there were separate CS and IS departments. CS was there for "programming" and IS was there for "job skills". The really important stuff was all in the math department.
One thing I noticed once I had transferred, and this may just be a symptom of the particular university, but the transfer students in general had a better grip on basic math (ie calculus and discrete math) than the students who entered university as freshmen. The moral of the story is that universities focus more on the upper-division (ie interesting) stuff than the intro classes, and JC's are good for intro classes if you know how to game the system.
My HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCE is on DRUGS.
I can't imagine a community college computer science cirriculum of any kind. One of the first computer science courses you have to take is Discrete Math, covering basic boolean logic and set theory, and the university students I was with whined enough as it is; I suspect a community college would simply revolt.
I have Mod Points at the moment, but modding you up would be useless; you'd just get modded back down [as I expect I will be shortly], and, in the process, I'd have lost my chance to reply to you [if I understand Mod Points correctly].
Anyway, the situation is much, much worse than you imagine: A poster later in this thread mentions a Massachusetts "college" that got rid of their "Linear Algebra" requirement because the students couldn't cut the mustard [and I imagine the "Linear Algebra" in question wasn't a whole lot more complicated than multiplying a couple of matrices].
My experience was even more pathetic than that, however: In the first week of teaching a course in "Intermediate C/C++", I tried to impress upon the students the importance of data typing, and of chosing a data type that was appropriate to the problem at hand. I tried to teach them about things like additive and multiplicative overflow [e.g. if you're really serious about your mathematics, then you've got to consider the possibility that adding two positive numbers could give you a negative number, or that multiplying two numbers could give you an NaN], and about granularity in floating point numbers [abcissas and exponents, and how e.g. 32-bit floats lose begin to lose their integer granularity at i = 16M].
The result? The students went absolutely ballistic, stormed the dean's office ["This isn't computer science! This is MATH!!!"], and damned near got me fired.
Well, I hung in there, and finished out the course. For their final project [with several weeks advance notice], I asked them to write a program that would dissect very large files into a series of smaller files [or "chunks", as I called them], each capable of fitting onto a 1.44MB floppy disk, and then reassemble the large files from the little chunks [this was about eight or nine years ago; similar commercial programs now exist to do this sort of thing, such as e.g. WinRAR, which, as I understand it, is very popular with pr0n downloaders].
I figured something like this might take them about a day or so - maybe a solid eight hours on a Saturday afternoon/evening, or four hours on two consecutive Saturday afternoons - but that it was not completely unreasonable, given that they had several weeks to work on it.
The result? No student in the class turned in a working program. Or, as a certain [formerly] rotund radio personality would say: "Zip, Zero, Nada". It was just completely beyond their abilities to even begin to undertake.
Furthermore, this was not the only community college course I taught [although it was certainly the most "advanced"], and I would say that, in the maybe 18 months to 2 years that I was hanging around the community college system, I NEVER SAW A SINGLE "STUDENT" WHO WAS EVEN REMOTELY CAPABLE OF WRITING A WORTHWHILE COMPUTER PROGRAM IN A LANGUAGE LIKE C, OR EVEN REMOTELY CAPABLE OF ADMINISTERING SOMETHING MISSION CRITICAL, LIKE AN RDBMS DATABASE.
I realize that what follows is a profoundly un-PC thing to say, but community college students are morons; their IQs just aren't high enough to do this sort of thing [on average - and yes, I know that any time you take a population of several million, there will always be a few bright bulbs way out at the far end of the bell curve, and that one of those exceptional lights just might be a lone Slashdot reader who stumbles upon this comment]. And [what's possible worse]: Even if they did have the requisite IQ, they don't have the "fire in the belly" that a person needs in order to tackle a complicated problem and see a potential solution through to its completion.
And I'd go even one step further than that: Having taught at major