I made it thru CA higher ed with no loans and no rich parents. Can’t ply ball either. Like you, I attended community college, then Cal-State.
I am a graduate in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley and I hate the place.
It is a sham as an institution of higher learning. The professors in the College of
Engineering almost don’t teach. Instead, they hire Teaching Assistants (most of mine were from India) to run their classes while they draw down $500k a year and work on their pet research grants (more government money. Far from a wonderful system, the System of “Higher Education” in California is, like most of the rest of the country, a RAT ship for lazy liberals who have convinced other lazy liberals that they actually know something. Oh, and just so you know, I went there when Jerry the Fairy’s father was governor and it was (and still is) the same when one of my kids went there.