Community college practitioners frequently bemoan negative or stereotypical representations of community college students and community college life in general in the popular media. Saturday Night Live skits and satirical news reports in The Onion enjoy poking fun at community colleges, while mainstream news outlets often fail to challenge stereotypes of community colleges as lacking academic rigor. Those frustrated by these portrayals should know that the press overwhelmingly lauded 2 year colleges during the early decades of the "junior college" movement. Such reporting celebrated the new institutions' missions, and praised their speedy growth as components of public education. In fact, the press often implied that these new campuses reflected an inevitable step in the evolution of American higher education. This paper analyzes media reports about public 2 year colleges (at the time called junior colleges) published during the 1920s and 1930s. The term junior college is used in this historical review since the term was common during the era in question.