A practical problem with community colleges are the plain fact that high ambition people tend not to be there. People with ambition tend not to be there, or are operating from a disadvantage and community college is the best they can get, at that time in their lives. This defines the initial network of a community college attendee, as well as their operating environment. There is quite a bit of invisible help that arises simply from one's environment being a can-do ambitious place. Not saying community colleges do not have positive environments, but at a university setting becoming a degree professional is the given.
If you need to use the bathroom, you're very often better off walking into a lawyer's office than walking into a restaurant, because the restaurant workers have the expectation that a certain percentage of customers are going to shit on the floor, and the lawyer's secretary doesn't, so you don't have to work as hard to combat that expectation.
The same thing happens with community colleges, which have all kind of policies designed to protect the college from the students. Everything down to when you can be there and whether you can talk with a friend in the library is subject to much more negative expectations than in a real university. You can get a lot out of community college in terms of learning, but it's generally more of a struggle.
I agree that this is a valid concern, but how do you feel about the statistical part of this sort of problem? Isn't the elite always the top n% (1%, 5%, 10%, etc) You can fatten up the statistics in the middle somewhat, and shrink the poles of the bell curve, but I don't see how you hope to equalize "access to the elite."
