UCSD was more affordable in those days. $212 per quarter registration. $46 per year for parking. Books around $100 per quarter...less money recovered by reselling books from a prior quarter. Brown bag lunch. Gas was 30 cents per gallon. I burned about 2 gallons per day on campus. Some days I had pocket change for a bagel with cream cheese. Never had better than a 4 function calculator and a slide rule until after graduation. Others had HP-35 and HP-45. Hard to compete with that even for square roots. Factorials in the genetics classes were cumbersome with a 4 banger. A good school managed with pedestrian financial resources.
I was fortunate. When I came along a few years later the HP-11C was on sale at the Virginia Tech University bookstore for about $85. I bought one in 1982 and I still have it. It's got quite a bit of wear, and it once got dropped in to a sewage pump station during a start-up test, but it still works as well today as it did 36 years ago.
By the way, I also have an HP-35 I picked up a few years back. It now has a burned out element on its LED display so I'll need to tear in to it some time and replace the display module.
If you have any interest today in HP calculators, there is an excellent HP-41 emulator available for smart phones. The app functions as an HP-41CX (the crown jewel of calculators - the one space shuttle astronauts carried as a back-up navigation computer). It includes emulators for just about every plug-in module HP ever made for that series of calculators. I think it costs about $10-$15 for the full version. It's one of the few phone apps I have ever paid real money for, and it was well worth it.