There's been a general decline in California's willingness to fund the UC system, which is mostly what ended that. Surprisingly, the UC system doesn't seem to h

There's been a general decline in California's willingness to fund the UC system, which is mostly what ended that. Surprisingly, the UC system doesn't seem to have had significant cost-per-student growth (unlike many universities), so it should still be able to provide free education if it were funded at the same levels as in the '60s. But it isn't: adjusted for inflation and population, it's had about 50-70% of its support cut compared to the peak years (depending on what you take as a starting point), which has been mostly made up for by tuition. Partly also by expanding cash-cow programs, like professional masters programs, and by admitting a smaller proportion of in-state students, since out-of-state students pay much higher tuition. I collected some numbers on that a few years ago: http://www.kmjn.org/misc/uc_funding.txt http://www.kmjn.org/misc/uc_funding.txt. That table shows total and per-student support; the latter is partly impacted by the growth in student numbers. But if you convert the numbers for each year to percent of state GDP, or support per resident, there's a large decline in those terms as well (in GDP terms, from roughly 0.3% to 0.1%). Interestingly there's no real correlation between partisan politics and the numbers. Funding was generally high under both Republican and Democratic administrations in earlier years, and has been cut under both administrations in more recent years. My guess is that as a "discretionary" line in the budget the UC is just relatively easy to chop, when someone making up a budget needs to close some holes, so it ended up bearing the brunt of the recent budget crisis that was caused by other parts of the budget.