I have a son in a state university now. Unfortunately, things are so competitive even in a state school; I don't believe the community college pipeline is viable. Yes, technically you can go to a CC and try to transfer to a state university. The odds of that happening, is however very difficult. At my son's large state university, it is almost impossible to transfer majors now. The reason being is that there are so many students and applicants wanting to go into the popular majors. The queue does not move. If you are in, you are in. If you are not, you need a miracle to get into a popular major like CS, engineering, biomedical etc.

If you can't make it into a state school of choice after high school, going to a CC, getting good grades in those classes, might give them a second chance to get in. For a state school, and this is hardly guaranteed. One trick is to see if they have quotas based on geography in the state. So you want to get into UW in Seattle, it might make sense moving to Spokane, attending Spokane Community College for a year, and then re-apply to UW as an Eastern Washingtonian! It might work, who knows.

Doesn't apply to really top schools. You aren't going to transfer into MIT, Stanford, Caltech from a CC, or probably any other university.

did that accidentally via the military. enlisted out of HS -- the post-9/11 US was a weird place -- and CLEP'd out of a few courses, and then did community college until I hit the 2 year mark.

transferred easily to a large state school, and then hit a high-end tech school for grad.

Finished with ~40% of the GI bill money left, and spent that on IT certs and part of the grad school cost. Meanwhile dudes I know from HS dropped 50k a year to go to private schools and are still paying off loans.

I don't think my undergrad courses were particularly bad or good. English 101 has some pretty straightforward curriculums, and US history hasn't changed that much.