Comment by viccis

>Certainly if a student can get admitted into an ivy league they should at least inquire about eligible aid packages.

Bear in mind when I say "elite college", I'm not talking Ivy Leagues, as those have covered tuition for the non-wealthy students for a while now. I'm talking elite liberal arts colleges (Amherst, Swarthmore), elite private universities (MIT, Rice), etc. Many state schools cover a lot but your mileage varies dramatically, and it's often tied to fairly intense GPA requirements. Georgia Tech has a student suicide problem because of this, for example.

>This was ~15 years ago but during that time all the teachers at the CC had Masters degrees in their field and also had additional teaching credentials(some had PHDs).

It's much worse now. A lot of the core classes (calculus, first semester bio and chem, etc.) don't have teachers at all. You're given all of your instruction via canned videos and your homework and evaluation through online tests. There's often a way to contact a teacher of some sort, but they will mostly be terse and just link you to a resource to work on it yourself or direct you to a forum where you and your classmates can talk about it.

This isn't covid, this is from this year. A lot of this started with covid but has stuck around for budgetary reasons. YMMV but for a lot of places, this is how you cut costs to be able to easily offer free college. Some of the classes will still have teachers, but the big ones that people typically use CC for will be largely automated because that's what scales.