> Honestly, California is the only state where I'd unabashedly recommend this path though. The community colleges are consistently good, you have multiple choic

> Honestly, California is the only state where I'd unabashedly recommend this path though. The community colleges are consistently good, you have multiple choices in terms of top tier public universities, and transfer students are given priority. The are curriculum-design rules at the 4-year state schools in CA to smooth the transition too, which I think is fairly unusual. When I was working at UC Santa Cruz, my department proposed a new degree program, and an important part of the overall proposal was to show that there would be ways to fulfil the first two years of credit requirements (plus the prereqs for years 3/4) via courses commonly offered at in-state community colleges, so you could transfer in and still graduate on time. This does complicate design of certain kinds of curricula (it tends to discourage course sequences that strongly build on each other), but gives students more options.