Columnist Jay Mathews' Brother Attended SF State After Community College

WASHINGTON POST -- My family, like many others, has positive feelings about community colleges. They were called junior colleges when my parents attended the two-year school in Long Beach, California. My mother went on to UCLA, but my father did not graduate from a four-year college. With his junior college degree, his World War II service and much hard work, he supported our family of four as an oil industry reporter and then technical editor for the Navy. My brother graduated from the two-year College of San Mateo in our Bay Area home town. He then got a B.A. in communications from San Francisco State. He worked for many years as a CSM audio visual staffer and now teaches computers at an elementary school.