This seems so obviously important to me and yet there is pretty much no will to do it in the government.

Yeah...I really don't understand the government's deliberate strangulation of research and positive advancement. Part of the prosperity of the 20th century was driven by a flood of funding into technological innovations of multiple fronts. It's a shame it took a war to bring it on, but it was so obviously beneficial it looks stupid not to acknowledge it.

My guess is that most politicians don't come from STEM backgrounds, mostly law or public policy so they don't see the inherit value in it.

Coupled with the American war on intellectualism and a capturing of the state by corporations, and higher education bloated with administrators, there are sufficient blockers that a coordinated state level AAA online higher education system will be pretty hard to achieve.

The closest possibility is that the California state school system develops an online wing.

Pretty sure this will help them move in that direction:

https://www.khanacademy.org/donate