I have plugged Community Colleges into the spreadsheet noting transfer requirements.
Here is a cautionary note on community colleges.
Community colleges in the U.S. typically have open admissions, and part of their mission is to provide a low-cost path to higher education for nontraditional students, including adults returning to school. We moved to a suburb with "good schools" so our children will have high-performing peers. Very few children from our high school will start at a community college, and none of the best students will. I'd be very wary of putting a gifted child in a community college, because that's not where the smartest people are. Even repeating high school in a "good school" would provide more appropriate peers.
I have little direct knowledge of community colleges. Stories like
Community College Students Face a Very Long Road to Graduation make me wary. I know there are lots of smart kids at Harvard and MIT, and that with elite colleges admissions so difficult and the costs so high, that the state flagship for us, U Mass Amherst, also has some very smart kids. How many community colleges have a critical mass of those kinds of kids, and how do you find them?
