There's a lot to this, but a university like UC Berkeley does educate far, far more undergraduates than a very elite private like Stanford or Harvard, and enrol

There's a lot to this, but a university like UC Berkeley does educate far, far more undergraduates than a very elite private like Stanford or Harvard, and enrolls more low income students than the entire ivy league combined, something you can say about several different UC campuses. Although UC gets support from the state, the massive endowments and favored tax status of the very elite privates may be more valuable than direct state support, with fewer strings attached. The UCs are inefficient with money, but think about how much places like Stanford and Harvard are able to spend on an undergraduate class size that might be a quarter to a fifth the size of a UC, with a lower percentage of low income students as well. If you consider scale an important factor, measuring a university by how many students it can educate in addition to how well they do after graduation… you know, I think the UCs may be a far more "efficient" model than the ivies.