Wyle_E_Coyote
Northern Virginia
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US colleges and universities vary tremendously in difficulty of curriculum, and likewise vary in admission criteria.
Schools like University of California - Berkeley, Stanford, Massachusetts Institute of Technology only takes the best and the brightest. To get accepted you have pretty much have perfect high school grades and very high test scores. Stanford only has a 5% acceptance rate. The difficulty of the curriculum reflects that.
Then there are good quality state schools, like Michigan State, University of Maryland. You need to have good grades and test scores to get in, but the standards are below that of the top schools. University of Maryland has a 48% acceptance rate, Michigan State accepts 66% of applicants. Curriculum not as difficult as the top schools.
And so on...
Some colleges have what's called "open enrollment" which means they take pretty much everyone. Many (most? all? every one I've been around) community colleges fall into this category. Curriculum is less difficult. My son attends a community college, he says the classes are easier than his high school classes (caveat, he went to a top public high school and went through the IB program, so more difficult high school classes than most). Back in the dark ages when I went to a community college, I thought they were about the same level as my high school classes.
These are, of course, broad generalizations, and a lower ranked school may have a particular department that is the top for that discipline.
One thing to keep in mind where I've heard the US is different than other countries, is that we don't have a national standard curriculum even for our K-12 schools. Curriculum standards are left to the state and local governments. So there can be pretty wide differences in the quality and difficulty of k-12 schools from state to state, and even between different school districts in the same state.
So, yeah, his community college courses likely would not have been as challenging as a typical four year university.
https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities
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