Community college is like buying bargain-basement clothing, at first you can't believe the savings, then the public shame sets in, and finally you realize you got exactly what you payed for. At school I sometimes get the sensation that I'm walking down the aisles of the local Wal-Mart.
There aren't many other options, though. Our state university is two hours from our city; so, you can study or you can work, but you cannot do both. Cities like Austin, Texas, Chapel Hill, North Carolina and Berkeley, California have the advantage of pairing affordable universities with nearby jobs, and the cities there seem to grow as if by magic
Once upon a time the City College of New York was considered the Proletarian Harvard. The college didn't charge tuition until 1976, enabling people to get a degree who otherwise wouldn't have had the chance. The class of 1937 alone produced four Nobel laureates.
The first universities in our sense of the word evolved out of monasteries, sex-segregated complexes removed from the cities and manors of the middle ages, surrounded by walls. To this day universities have aped this monastic impulse to hide away from the world. Indeed, medieval monasteries had walls not to keep the monks in but the world out - the world was a violent place and knowledge was difficult to preserve. This was at a time when books were literally worth their weight in gold, when even the ruling class was functionally illiterate, when one stray spark could burn an entire library to the ground; we can say that a library was not really a library, it was a vault.
Universities are no longer finishing schools for would-be aristocrats, or citadels of learning, or hermetic retreats - they are information factories that are frequently paid for by holding copyrights on their own production. Universities are integrating directly into the economy, with students, workers, and academics shifting back and forth from school to private sector and back again, rather than simply graduating from one to the other. The old paradigm of school as something you complete before entering the workforce is no longer optimal.
