This was one of the things I loved about my community college / transfer-to-a-commuter-state-school experience: once you got through about a year of the program

This was one of the things I loved about my community college / transfer-to-a-commuter-state-school experience: once you got through about a year of the program, 90% of the people left were pretty serious about improving their lives with their education. A lot of "nontraditional" students, older students, people with kids, etc. Yeah, it sucked that only a scant handful of people got internships with any prestige attached, but if you actually cared about learning from each other you got the opportunity to. (Even there, I learned a ton from the guy sitting next to me flexing his vim skills and shit-talking the databases professor -- there's always somebody!) For the vast majority of people, the alternative to that isn't Stanford -- it's some "traditional" four-year institution where a good portion of your classmates are really there to plagiarize and finesse some early-stage alcoholism. A lot of my community college classmates may not have been "the smartest minds", but having an environment where people cared was far better for my learning than the time at a private school I'd spent in courses full of hungover rich kids.