Community college ostensibly for people who don’t have a good track record from High School, but is often advertised as the cheap, local option for people who don’t want to feel bad about having to go.
I did in fact try community college and it’s really just high school material with smaller text. I even took it in parallel with an edX equivalent and the material wasn’t even close to each other. The idea that CC is suppose to replace the first 2 years at a real college is terrifying and reinforces how much of the professional word is theater.
If you do any number of years at a community college, you should be able to apply as a freshman to a real college if you want.
In many CCs, the degree-track classes you take are going to be the same ones that you take at a 4-year school, because the schools are going to fall under the accreditation board. The big difference is that CCs tend to have more certificate programs, and two-year degree programs
The CC art classes were far harder than many of the art classes that I took in art school. Art school cares more about concept than just execution (outside of the commercial arts classes, where you need to be very technically proficient). I’ve seen plenty of e.g. painters with very mediocre technique that got rave reviews from professors in art school because they had a very compelling concept and approach, even though the execution was flawed. CC though? It was all about foundational techniques. If your technique sucked, you got a shitty grade, because there’s no ‘concept’ when you’re reproducing a still life that the teacher set up in the middle of the room. (I would post one of the self-portraits I did in a freshman CC class to give an example of what I mean by technique, but I’m way too identifiable to do that, even though it’s been 20 years.)
My CC calc classes? Just as hard as four year. CC physics? Yup.