If you ask me, I have to say that I have found too many times the quality of the instruction in the community college class to be less than desired, and I refuse to think that is because you pay less at community colleges (or am I wrong?). However, when you put yourself in the instructor's shoes, you may hear this answer: "I want to raise the level of instruction in the class, but how can you teach the student, when they come to the classroom lacking knowledge of subjects that they are supposed to already know from prerequisites?". So they cannot give the student as much as they want because they would have to spend probably equal class time just to bring the student up to speed on the prerequisites. How can we start to take measures to really solve this problem? maybe the instructor could start to give an extra small time to try to supplement pre-requisites, however wouldn't this be an imposition on the instructor, to ask him to teach more than he is being paid for? maybe the instructor in charge of teaching the pre-requisite should make sure to do a good job in his class. I think it boils down to make sure each instructor does a thorough job when teaching his subject. But still, hard to give a silver bullet solution, because, everybody must move at the same time, otherwise there will be instructors that find students that don't have the pre-requisite knowledge. Tough cookie.