THE STUDENT SERVICES CENTER at Golden West College (Tribune photo).
They say you can’t go home again and that’s mainly because home isn’t the same as you remember it.
One of my “homes” for a big chunk of my life was Golden West College in Huntington Beach. I attended GWC for two years and came back as a professor of journalism and mass communications for what turned out to be over three decades.
As a student, I felt I got as good an education – and maybe better – at that JC than I received when I transferred to the university. As someone who later taught at GWC and at Cal State Long Beach, neither group of students seemed smarter than the other.
Many of our “kids” had started out at a four-year school, flamed out and ended up a college that – as a group – has been derided as a trade school, or – in the old days – a high school with ashtrays.
Many students, especially ethnic minorities, were the first in their family to attend any college. Later on, and especially if they rose to career heights, some of them concealed their start as if it somehow tainted their accomplishments.
I think community colleges have a sort of inferiority complex. They get less respect, less funding and less of the spotlight. Yet they educate more Californians for less money than the UC and CSUC systems.
What I didn’t like about GWC was the architecture. It consisted of a series of big orange boxes. It looked like the world’s biggest Home Depot. There was nothing warm or welcoming about the place.
That’s almost all changed. I visited the college for the first time after those three decades and found it transformed. It now has a high-tech, futuristic feel to it. Buildings are taller, creating more open space.
There is more beauty. It looks like the kind of place I wouldn’t mind attending when I was 18.
But would I have bragged about it? The jury is still out about that.
