IN 1974, I GRADUATED from Skyline High School in Oakland, California, an underachieving student with lousy SAT scores. Allowed to send my results to three colleges, I chose MIT and Villanova, knowing such fine schools would never accept a student like me but hoping they’d toss some car stickers my way. I couldn’t afford tuition for college anyway. I sent my final set of stats to Chabot, a community college in nearby Hayward, California, which, because it accepted everyone and was free, would be my alma mater.
For thousands of commuting students, Chabot was our Columbia, Annapolis, even our Sorbonne, offering courses in physics, stenography, auto mechanics, certified public accounting, foreign languages, journalism— name the art or science, the subject or trade, and it was probably in the catalog. The…