<p>Also, community college can be a black hole (I had to go because my grades fell through the floor for 3 semesters in high school while my father battled cancer) but only if you let it. More and more CCs nowadays have transfer programs with special classes that you have to qualify for academically (and you would, considering that you already had the chops to get into USC) and it would get you the credits but wouldn’t be fancy in any meaningful sense. The important thing is where you finish though, and nowadays 20% of PhDs actually start in community colleges. Personally, I’m not a fan of mine very much as they really are the unsexy underworld of academia. Still, I had several friends of mine who transferred to elite schools - Duke, Northwestern, etc. - but they were the exception, not the rule. We’re talking a dozen kids out of 30,000.</p>