What you need for a college/university depends a lot on what your goals are.
Back 20 years ago when I was looking for schools for EE, one of the researchers I was working with told me flat out that if I planned to go to graduate school (which I did), then nobody would care where you did undergraduate so long as it was good enough to get you into the grad school you want.
Similar for doctors, lawyers, etc. If the lawyer graduated from Harvard Law you never hear that they went to Podunk U for undergrad.
On the other hand, if you are doing a business-type degree (and not continuing for MBA), then the contacts from your undergraduate degree are vital so you need to make sure the school you choose provides good contacts. Likewise for a variety of other fields, especially those that don't usually involve higher degrees. Not to say that you can't get a wonderful education from lesser-known schools, but you will need to work that much harder to generate the contacts you will need in order to advance in your career (assuming that is what you want to do in life).
But if you aren't sure what you want to do, or aren't sure whether you are ready for the rigor of academic life, the community college is a good place to start to sort things out at a cheaper rate while building a decent foundation. At that point it really isn't worth going thousands of dollars in debt "finding yourself."
I think the move to learning to use structured documents is the best part about spending time in LaTeX (which I did in grad school, even doing the initial conversion of the IEEE class from the old style file back a decade or so ago).
I now work almost 100% with Word in my work environment, but look to use what structures are there (heading levels, captions, cross-references). It always surprises/appalls me how few of the highly-educated people I work with can handle even those simple concepts (leading to ongoing back-and-forth with the boss, for example, when he adds a figure and manually captions it in the middle of the document and then complains that he can't "fix" my figure numbers). Then they complain as they wind up typing a table of contents by hand since "the built-in one doesn't work."
BTW, anyone who says that Word is easier for fine-tuning layout has obviously never fought with placement of figures in a document (something that LaTeX makes so easy).
Slashdot Mirror
What you need for a college/university depends a lot on what your goals are.
Back 20 years ago when I was looking for schools for EE, one of the researchers I was working with told me flat out that if I planned to go to graduate school (which I did), then nobody would care where you did undergraduate so long as it was good enough to get you into the grad school you want.
Similar for doctors, lawyers, etc. If the lawyer graduated from Harvard Law you never hear that they went to Podunk U for undergrad.
On the other hand, if you are doing a business-type degree (and not continuing for MBA), then the contacts from your undergraduate degree are vital so you need to make sure the school you choose provides good contacts. Likewise for a variety of other fields, especially those that don't usually involve higher degrees. Not to say that you can't get a wonderful education from lesser-known schools, but you will need to work that much harder to generate the contacts you will need in order to advance in your career (assuming that is what you want to do in life).
But if you aren't sure what you want to do, or aren't sure whether you are ready for the rigor of academic life, the community college is a good place to start to sort things out at a cheaper rate while building a decent foundation. At that point it really isn't worth going thousands of dollars in debt "finding yourself."
I think the move to learning to use structured documents is the best part about spending time in LaTeX (which I did in grad school, even doing the initial conversion of the IEEE class from the old style file back a decade or so ago).
I now work almost 100% with Word in my work environment, but look to use what structures are there (heading levels, captions, cross-references). It always surprises/appalls me how few of the highly-educated people I work with can handle even those simple concepts (leading to ongoing back-and-forth with the boss, for example, when he adds a figure and manually captions it in the middle of the document and then complains that he can't "fix" my figure numbers). Then they complain as they wind up typing a table of contents by hand since "the built-in one doesn't work."
BTW, anyone who says that Word is easier for fine-tuning layout has obviously never fought with placement of figures in a document (something that LaTeX makes so easy).