Thousands of international students from around the world attend Junior Colleges in the States. Whether they be general Students, Performing Artists, Visual Artists, or Athletes, Junior College is a pretty common pathway. I’ll go over what they actually are first and foremost and give you a bit of an explanation on how they work.

Junior colleges or community colleges are two-year institutions. There are literally thousands of them across the US. There’s around 1,100 or so that have full time competitive sports programs that also have their own performing arts and visual arts programs. They’ve got everything that a bigger university or four-year college has. Everything is identical including the coursework. They do the first two years as opposed to all four years in a bachelor’s degree. So, they are two-year institutions.

But people seem to have the belief here in Australia and New Zealand that junior colleges, are like TAFE it’s a pre-university or it’s junior, so it’s not as good. Or it’s high school coursework.

That’s okay, because it’s something you’re unfamiliar with, so it’s human nature to compare things to what you know.

“They’ve got everything that a bigger university or four-year college has”

Junior colleges do offer vocational coursework but not to international students. International students cannot go over and do vocational studies and get regional certificates, they are only good in the States, and bringing them back to Australia and New Zealand have no worth.

They protect international students in that sense and at a junior college you can only study university level coursework, so it’s literally the first and second year of a four-year bachelor’s degree. So, if you want to do sports science then you’re doing all of your general sciences biology, anatomy, and physiology all in that first and second year, which then allows you to move on and do your third and fourth year at a bigger school and continue with advanced studies in a particular field.

Junior colleges and community colleges offer the first two years of any four-year degree. You can’t get a bachelor’s degree from a two-year college but you can get a two year degree called an associate degree.

“So, if your goal is to get a bachelor’s degree, then after you do two years at a junior college or community college, you would then transfer to either a university or a bigger four year college and do your third and fourth year”

That associate degree … you can get at a university in two years, you can get an associate degree at a four-year college in two years. And it just so happens that with a junior college, a two-year college, that’s where they stop. They stop at an associate degree and then you have to obviously transfer…If you want.

So, if your goal is to get a bachelor’s degree, then after you do two years at a junior college or community college, you would then transfer to either a university or a bigger four-year college and do your third and fourth year. You don’t have to do all four years over all over again, you just do the last two years.

So, it’s the exact same as if you went to a bigger university right from the start and did four years in one place or you did two years at a junior college and then two years at a university or four-year college to get a bachelor’s degree in four years.

“However, costs may be a little bit different, actually a lot different”

If it wasn’t the exact same, then all of your coursework at a junior college wouldn’t transfer to a bigger school and a good example of that is the relationships that junior colleges have with bigger universities and colleges for eg. Iowa Central have the exact same course curriculum as the University of Iowa and Iowa State. However, costs may be a little bit different, actually a lot different.

Massive difference in terms of costs. You look at bigger universities and four year colleges, they will hold a high price tag. You can really pay as much as you want in some of those bigger schools and sometimes going in as a first-year student it’s hard to get those costs down, into an affordable range with your foreign credentials.

So, the easiest way to get a better deal or to pay less for the exact same credits is to go the two routes, because costs are a lot lower, class sizes are smaller, there’s more support. The college experience is exactly the same. You’re going to class, you’re training, you’re doing all the exact same things at that two-year institution that you would be doing at a bigger one.

I think the best thing about a two-year college is that it’s an age appropriate competition, coaches are recruiting you to play. For eg, Matt Wade our Prospect Director here at NSR was a coach at a 2 year College, and through his own experience as a Head Coach he had half his team transfer to a bigger school every single year so when he recruited athletes he needed kids to come in that were ready to play as he only had them for two years or sometimes only one year.

“The college experience is exactly the same. You’re going to class, you’re training, you’re doing all the exact same things at that two-year institution that you would be doing at a bigger one.”

So when you’ve got a coach that’s recruiting for a two year program, they’re recruiting kids to play which means that you as an 18 year old student, going into a system, if you go into a bigger school there may be kids that are 23, 24 years old, that have been there for ages, and then there’s you this little 18 year old with no experience in college, like how are you going to fare against those kids that have been there and how much playing time are you actually going to get?

The first two years of your studies is the hard stuff, that’s the grunt work, you have to crawl before you walk.  I’ll use Matt as an example with sports science, he had to do biology, anatomy, physiology, chemistry and it’s the same for any sport science major. Same with business, same with engineering. Those first two years are going to be identical.

If you’re in a bigger school with a bigger student population, and all the students in a particular field need to do those same classes that means that your class sizes are going to be massive. You may have 1,200 people in a lecture hall, with your class being taught from a screen and you can’t raise your hand and ask questions… you have no personal contact with your teacher really.

“So essentially, it just gives you a lot more time to adjust in a lot of different ways, you play more, you enjoy it more”

And remember this is a completely foreign environment for you. It’s something you’ll have to adjust to, so smaller class sizes, smaller lecture halls, it makes it a little bit easier to adjust and lift your grades.

Moving into a new environment where you’re mixing full time studies with full time training and travelling… these are all new and different experiences. Having small class sizes, having the chance to know your teachers, raise your hand ask questions and being able to access all the different types of support on campus, very, very easily and very readily available, it just makes that transition that much more seamless.

And after your two years, you’ll be ready to then look at something bigger, and you can move on to something with more confidence. So essentially, it just gives you a lot more time to adjust in a lot of different ways, you play more, you enjoy it more and we have Matt and Jacob here in the office who can vouch for that 100%. They went through that!

“No matter how academic you are, going in to a junior college is never ever a bad thing”

Matt from our office started at a university, spent one semester at a university and hated it. The social side of things was different, it wasn’t what he expected, but also the classes were bigger and he struggled.  He couldn’t do it … and he is from the States.

He wasn’t a student that was super, super confident in his academics or super independent and able to be self-motivated, he needed a little bit more help. So he went from that university and transferred to a junior college, where he could do the next year and a half which was the best thing that he ever did because he got his grades up and then that made his transfer onto a four year college.

His scholarship made it affordable! He would have to pay triple then what he would have paid initially, so it just made so much sense, and it makes so much sense for our international kids too. No matter how academic you are, going in to a junior college is never ever a bad thing.

 

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