Interesting looking at the type of stuff kids do in four year schools.
I'm in my engineering lab right now in my little, local community college and everyone is working like crazy. Class ends at 12:30 but most students will stay until at least 3:00. Then the majority of them will go to work at a part-time job.
Several students just came to me to complain about one of their lab partners in another class....they told me he wasn't serious enough and did not want to attend their extra, volunteer study session next Saturday (that they've arranged on their own). This is what community college engineering students are mostly like; serious and focused.
Our tuition is about $1,800 per semester.
We use the same books for Calc and Comp 1 as Princeton and have a number of award winning writers in our English dept. My office-mate (an EE) worked at Murray Hill with Bardeen and Schockley, helping to develop the first transistor. I often eat lunch with Dr. Einstein, a physicist and one of our Physics teacher. You've probably heard of his cousin.
Unless a kid gets a full scholarship, I've never understood why more average people don't send their kids to a community college for the first two years.