The main problem now is that admission to most UC campuses has grown so competitive—and state funding and physical space have become so scarce—that scores of qualified in-state students are getting turned away, the CCO says. At six of the nine undergraduate UC schools, the average GPA among admitted students last year was higher than 4.0. (The UC gives students a GPA bump for taking AP courses.) At the three most competitive campuses—Berkeley, UCLA, and UC San Diego—the median scores on the 2400-point SAT were 2140, 2120, and 2070, respectively. The gap between the number of applicants and admitted students has more than doubled between 1996 and 2013. “Would we like [the UC system] to be larger? Sure,” Robinson said. “Is that likely to happen? Probably not.”

And it’s not just the UC schools. Even some of the California State University campuses—which draw from the top third of the state’s high-school graduates—have been rejecting qualified applicants. In fact, roughly one in four of the system’s 23 campuses now has admissions standards that are higher than the baseline CSU eligibility requirements, a phenomenon known as impaction. The university system had to deny admission to tens of thousands of eligible students between 2009 and 2014, says the CCO report. The gap between the number of applicants and those admitted to CSU has grown as fast as the UC’s own gap.

“Students who would’ve gotten into UCs are lucky to go to CSUs, and students who would’ve gotten into CSUs are being locked out,” said Lynda McGee, a college counselor at a downtown L.A. magnet high school, in a press briefing Monday. The situation is so dire that McGee advises high schoolers—students whose taxpaying parents, she emphasized, have helped bankroll UC and CSU schools over the years—to apply to private or out-of-state colleges where they have a better shot at admission. “We need to be able to offer more to our students who are residents of our state,” she said.

But hefty state funding cuts in recent years have forced California’s higher-education institutions to rely more heavily on tuition revenue, prompting them to favor out-of-state students who pay higher rates to attend. “It’s absolutely a priority of the UC system to enroll in-state students as opposed to out-of-state ones,” Robinson said. “We’re in the access business, and we cannot admit everyone who’s qualified … it makes it difficult for us to fulfill our basic mission.”

The institutions are, by and large, doing what they can to mitigate the impact of cuts on in-state students. “Impaction doesn’t mean ‘there is no room at the inn.’ It means that space is limited,” Toni Molle, a spokeswoman for CSU, said in an email. Students who are less likely to get accepted at their first campus of choice, she added, are “borderline” applicants, whose GPAs and test scores barely meet eligibility requirements. The university system is also striving to reduce the time students have to spend pursuing their degrees, hiring more tenure-track faculty, improving advising services, and better preparing students, among other efforts. CSU also boasts one of the most diverse student populations in the country.