In terms of cost, if you find a place with roommates, housing should be a smaller fraction of cost compared to UCI's tuition. CCs are fantastic value. The best thing to do is look into tuition costs for UCI and CC as well as housing and food costs. Once you have those budgets, you can weigh the options more accurately in terms of how valuable they are to you against how much the cost. In terms of my own experience, I took a lot of breadth requirements at CC and really enjoyed them. I know people who transferred to UCI from CCs and they were very successful at UCI. They may have been the most motivated CC students though, I couldn't really say.