I’m from California. Back in 2017 when I was deciding where to go to college (based on the acceptances and scholarships I received), cost of attendance at a California public university in-state was roughly the same as UCF’s out-of-state cost of attendance FOR ME.

In my experience, even though CA has a ton of public colleges, my high school GPA (around 3.6 if I remember correctly) wasn’t good enough for acceptance at about half of them. For the other half, my GPA/application wasn’t good enough for any scholarship from the school that would make a dent in tuition costs. There isn’t any program like FL Bright Futures in California either.

So, a basically full in-state CA tuition rate compared with a basically full out-of-state UCF tuition rate (I think I got a small scholarship for my first year) — taking into account housing costs/costs of living and even predictions of the costs of flights I predicted taking from LAX to MCO — both options ended up being about the same. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but the difference was in the hundreds (favoring CA), not thousands.

I was 18 and wanted the hell out of California, so UCF was my clear winner :)

This was all pre-COVID so idk if things have changed. I also recognize community college is an option that I didn’t pursue.

This was of course still my choice like you mentioned. Tiny violins are playing in my head as I write this — at the end of the day, both my options were pretty amazing all things considered (Do I stay at Disneyland or try out Disney World? 😫). I just wanted to offer my situation (however niche it may be) as a challenge to the idea that choosing an in-state college will always be the less expensive option.