Even if teachers have (which I'm not convinced of to begin with), Universities and land haven't. Its no secret that we've had an overpopulation crisis for the past few decades as is, so We haven't fully solved that issue as of now.

And I'm equally unsure if taxes have tripled, between increasing poverty on the bottom and more and more tax evasion on top.

I'm sure if we built new universities, there would be plenty of applicants to teach it in, given how fierce the competition for academic positions already is.

If capacity at existing colleges is the problem, we could start new ones.

Where exactly would you propose building them? A competitive university is going to require around 2,000 acres of land. Where are you going to find that in today's California? No doubt there is plenty of open space left, but it's not in very desirable areas.

The university does not need to be whole separated city nor include amusement park and catering.

It can be an institution integrated into a city.

Supposing that’s true for the sake of argument: Where?

Take a random hotel and make a uni out of it?

That doesn’t sound like it’s going to attract quality faculty.

GDP sure has, if the tax base doesn't reflect that it seems like that's a taxation problem.

Assuming you’re using “overpopulation” to refer to California’s housing shortage, this is not a “too many people” issue or a “not enough land issue”, but rather a “land isn’t being used efficiently” issue. Efficiently housing and moving large numbers of people is by and large a solved problem, with plenty of examples to learn from (see: any megacity in Asia).

California hasn’t solved the issue because some percentage of residents or other interest groups don’t want to solve the issue and have had the political means to block attempts at resolution.

None of these stats grew at the rate of tuition prices.

Which happens to be the metric that really matters.

From the outside, that seems to have primarily two reasons:

- universities wasting massive amounts of money on things that have nothing to do with academics, such as sports programs, stadiums, etc.

- because they can, due to people getting ridiculous loans to pay the ridiculous tuition cost.

So all that would have to be done there is ban them from charging these ridiculous fees. Is that not it?

> universities wasting massive amounts of money on things that have nothing to do with academics, such as sports programs, stadiums, etc.

Don't forget administrative bloat.

> and so has the tax base and # of teachers. This is a non-issue. Society scales.

The tax base and the number of higher education instructors may indeed have tripled. I'd have to check. But that would only be enough if you were going to teach the same fraction as went to college in 1960. What was that, 10 or 15%?

So we'd need something like a x30 increase in teachers. And even more in tax base (since we're building more campuses or enlarging the existing, not merely funding the existing ones).