So I’m going to community college in order to transfer sophomore year as a math major, and I’m really just seeing community college as an obstacle to get over. I already know math beyond what community colleges normally teach, and I don’t care that much about the other subjects, except maybe physics and writing.
So my plan is to get the work out of the way to make time for other stuff, like self-study, sleep, socializing, and maybe making some money from on-campus jobs like peer tutoring. I need 30 credits to transfer, so I’ll be taking 15 credits per semester. The estimates say that I should expect to spend 1-3 hours a week outside of lectures for every 1 hour of lecture, but I don’t believe this applies to me. I’m a pretty fast learner. When I was attending school, I was your run-of-the-mill “smart but lazy” kid who could pull off a good performance with little effort, but I had no discipline. Unfortunately, I slipped up big time in high school and yadda yadda it’s a boring story. Anyway, I’m motivated now, I’m getting treated for my recently-diagnosed ADHD, and I have 6 months to build my discipline and study habits, so I think I have a chance to do pretty well.
What I’m aiming for is to spend 20 minutes outside of class for every hour I spend in class. I have not been in a traditional classroom environment for a while, so it’s hard for me to remember specific details about how fast I learn from lectures, but I was that bored, annoying kid who would get the concepts pretty fast, yell out the answers before the teacher finished working through them, and spend 70% of the period just fidgeting around. Yeah, I was annoying. I wasn’t exactly popular, but I’m getting off topic.
Anyway, if you attend community college, how much work do you usually get per class? Is it more than in high school? Are community college classes harder than high school classes? Do professors tend to artificially conjure up and assign a ton of unhelpful busywork just to let you know that “you’re in college now; you should be spending an adult amount of time on your studies,” or is the size of the workload based on pedagogical practicality?
Every professor and community college will be different, and every student’s opinion and aptitude is different, so there is no way to generalize and be 100% accurate.
My advice is to examine the syllabus of each class at the beginning of each semester. That will give you an idea of what work will be required for each class and when major assignments will be due or tests will be given. Only then can you plan around your classes and guess at time commitments.
Also, when devoting time to different assignments and classes, prioritize according to what counts the most. If a particular test or project is 50% of a grade, then that is more important than a homework assignment in another class that is only going to be 5% of the grade. Also, a class that is worth 5 credit hours will affect your GPA more than a class worth 2 credit hours. Prioritizing like this will be especially helpful if you ever find yourself in a time crunch.
Scheduling your time in college will be an ongoing process that will change continually. Make adjustments as you go.
I’ve gotten to know some college students who were convinced to attend a program which bussed them to the CC then allowed them to attend the university-which they should have been attending from the start-after a year or two. Without exception, these students viewed the community college classes as much easier and they reported that getting A’s had been easy. They all attended one particular community college that is not known to be very strong/good. I’m guessing this program was started to make the stats for the community college look better without really changing the trajectories for those students who applied to go to the community college (rather than to the 4 year university).
Many cc (if not all) are open enrollment so they have to pitch the level of instruction to a much lower level than would be true for even the less competitive colleges. It is my opinion that most students who scored in the 500s or higher on the SATs and/or have a B average in high school will gain little from most community college classes and I would advise against students taking, say Calc 1 at a community college from enrolling in Calc 2 at a reasonably competitive school because the instructor for Calc 2 will probably presume a level of competency that may not have been actualized in Calc 1 at the community college. Others on this site will disagree with me but I wonder how many of those who disagree have a lot of experience with students (besides themselves or their offspring) who started off at community colleges and then attended a more competitive school.
Okay well use this site to help you out: ratemyprofessors.com… Use this site to make sure you choose a good professor. 
The difficulty will really depend on the major you choose and the professor you have. If you’re going to be a science major, prepare for atrocious long hour labs that are going to be at least three hours long, lol.
I think you might want to tweak your approach to community college a bit. You’re going to learn a lot more and get a lot more experience from being there if you don’t merely treat it as an obstacle prior to transferring. No doubt the professors at the school and students can teach you some stuff and they can also learn from you. Enjoy your time there and don’t dismiss it because of future expectations.