[PAPPPmAc]

Many (most?) state schools don't do significantly competitive admissions, and many have state mandates in the vein of "Anyone who graduated in the top half of their in-state high school gets admitted with the following terms." For most students and employers, they are largely interchangeable except for in-state tuition being cheaper (and to be clear, I think that is a good thing).

It's actually a bit of a problem in other ways though. The school I teach at gets an alarming number of students coming in as pre-engineering who have dramatic math or literacy deficits and would be better served with a year or two at a cheaper-for-everyone community college (or a not-broken highschool, but that's way harder to fix) instead of slamming into their first couple technical classes and failing because they don't understand variables and/or don't have the reading comprehension for the course materials unless/until they finish a pile of remediation. Universities have a profit motive to encourage this, since having a student take two years of high-margin large service classes while paying for room and board, then never consume any lower-margin resources, is a financial win for the university.

[a2xd94]

Agreed, the lack of respect for yet another thing that we all pay into (Community Colleges) is appalling. I remember that in high school, if you said you were going to Community College, you would be looked at as some kind of failure when in reality it was a great way to sober up and ease into adult life after high school, at a tiny fraction of the price of 4-year university...truly shameful that the majority of us willingly ignore one of the solutions to the whole issue with college degrees sometimes being viewed as not being useful, as well as the issue with excessive student loans.