The four year degree is treated as the safe option and the thing you do if you are unsure. It is a large commitment and it deserves to be chosen rather than defaulted into.
Most questions families get stuck on about school have a person whose actual job is answering them. The difficulty is knowing which person, and how to ask.
The three main sources of information about a school are each reliable for something and misleading for everything else. The trick is matching them to questions.
Most homework help crosses from support into authorship somewhere around the third correction. Knowing which minute that happens in is the whole skill.