Admissions at UC Berkeley, UCLA, and UCSD is near Stanford level for in-demand programs like EECS and Business, and plenty of us Ivy and Ivy-adjacents didn't get into a UC or didn't get Regents (thus potentially making an Ivy Adjacent cheaper).
My sibling is much younger, and in their time (late 2010s/early 2020s), admission stats to CS or Business even in "middling" (imo criminally underrated) UCs like UCR or UCSC became comparable to UCB barely a decade ago.
For top Californian students targeting Eng/CS these programs are very visible.
The good CSU programs (Eng/Business @ SJSU, SDSU, and CalPoly SLO) tend to overprotect their yield rate.
Personally, I and a significant proportion of my HS friend group would have preferred attending CalPoly SLO (it's a fun campus, great hiking, great beach, great academics, great job placements), but we all got rejected because our scores (SAT/GPA) were way higher than the median, yet we ended up at Ivy Tier programs (EECS@MIT/Berkeley/Stanford/etc). Same thing happened to my sibling as well.
This has been an issue for almost 2 decades now because high demand programs in Californian public universities (STEM, Business) haven't increased the amount of faculty or seats per department yet the number of students trying to apply to these programs has skyrocketed
That prevented UCs and CSUs from being able to dynamically expand STEM and Business faculty headcount.
That said, even Ivy League programs have fallen into the same trap - CS@Harvard is bursting at the seams and imo, the course quality is middling compared to UCs, UT, UIUC, UW, MIT, CMU, GT, etc, and recruiting isn't that different between a top public CS program and Ivies (the only difference is VC Analyst recruiting, but that's a horrible career that expires in 2-3 years. Only MBAs or experienced EMs/PMs/Founders or a handful of IB Analysts break into partner track [associate and above] roles).
It just keeps getting worse too because you can inherit a property on a stepped-up basis (meaning the cost gets reset to market value for capital gains tax purposes should you then sell it) but you can inherit your parents' advantageous property tax rate.
This problem is so bad that a minimal claw back of Prop 13 benefits (Prop 19), which would limit you to only inheriting ONE beneficial tax rate, barely passed.
Are half of CA voters really inheriting multiple properties with tax rates set in the 70s? Of course not. But people vote agains this kind of thing anyway.
The other argument for Prop 13 is kicking seniors out of their houses when they're on a fixed income. I mean, do you really still need that 5 bedroom house in Los Altos whhen you're a retired couple? Of course not, but you'll happily pass it onto your children with no taxes and the low property tax rate if you can.
If you're really concerned about seniors, you can carve out an exception just for them without giving an exception to everyone (including Disney). This is actually something that Texas handles better. You can stay in your house and defer your property taxes until you die. So there's an incentive to downsize and you're not priced out of your house if you really want to stay.
And for the longest time (only up until the last 5-10 years), Texas managed to have relatively good control on house prices. It's why it was so popular to move to Texas. But national trends finally caught up with Texas too.
Imagine what could've been funded if Prop 13 never passed. Infrastructure, education, health care, whatever.
