I’m in a catch 22 situation. I want to go to a four year college, but I was previously placed in the remedial track and have a poor academic standing. If I go to a community college, I could improve my grades, but the material they cover is a replacement for high school classes and I’d be precluded from signing up for entry classes at the four year college. This seems like to would put me at a disadvantage when that finally happened and I would only be setting myself up for long term failure.
I’d consider CC if I could “transfer” in as a freshman to a four year, but the colleges I looked into all have rules against applying as a freshman if you have two years worth of credits. When I tried CC, the material was absolutely high school level just with smaller font in the textbooks.
The CC classes aren’t called HS material, but the biology class I tried absolutely overlapped with the high school material. I could have probably dropped out as a high school freshman, got a GED and started with CC from there. I probably would have been able to negotiate with transferring as a freshman if my CC years were before I was an adult.
This isn’t any less true of a “real” college’s Bio 101. They don’t know what you actually covered (or retained) from HS, so intro classes almost always cover the same material for part of the class. That is in no way unique to (or weird of) Community Colleges.