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Universities have been competing for prestige since the beginning. When money is scarce you’re forced to compete for prestige, originally in things like rowing. Well more sports were added over time, more money was spent. These days college football is one of the most watched and followed sports in America. If a school can win championships it can win prestige. These starts an arms race of spending. You look at the Ohio State University and they’re funding their $170 million sports programs entirely from ticket sales/media rights/concessions/other forms of income directly related to sports. That’s great but most schools can not do that, most have to take money out of the student fees to do it. Ohio State Buckeyes sports money by the numbersPrestige comes from having shiny expensive heavily architectured buildings. At my school they were perpetually building several new state of the art buildings simultaneously (taking up all the parking lots btw) to the point where the landscape of the campus was changing. Those buildings are very expensive and that of course comes out of student fees. As an aside, prestige is also sought after through research and this has put an immense amount of pressure on professors to get money for research, which has spread their time pretty thin trying to actually, you know…profess.Administrative costs at universities has gone up. This isn’t always due to more administrators, but a lot of that is their benefits cost a lot more. i.e. healthcare expenses went up 40% from 2001- 2011 (and it’s gone up just as much since 2011 I’m sure). Report says administrative bloat, construction booms not largely responsible for tuition increasesAlso from that article - During the 2001 to 2011 time period, state funding per student fell $3,081 at research universities and $2,067 at nonresearch universities, a decline that was “in near lockstep with tuition increases,” according to the report. As a student at Oregon State University I went to Oregon State legislative day and got to personally meet with the senator from my district and sit with him on the floor and talk to him in his office. I tried to lobby for more university funding from our state legislature. He told me “well whatever money we put in Health and Human Services gets matched by the federal government. Therefore every $1 we put into state universities means $2 we lose from HHS.”

This is a chicken and the egg question on many levels. Many things affect the cost of living here. One is that it’s got nice weather so it’s got a natural draw to come. People are willing to pay extra for that.California is and has since its inception been a get rich quick state. It’s called The Golden State for crying out loud. What people quickly find out though is the reason it’s got so many high paying jobs is because the cost of living is so expensive. A lot of people come here specifically to make a lot of money and many do. This supports a high cost of housing. The state does have many ideas on how to make low income housing but it’s difficult because nobody wants low income housing near them and in many areas, traffic is already so bad that putting even more low income housing in congested areas (most low income people live in the cities) is just going to make everyone’s lives even more miserable.The reason taxes are so high is because people make a lot of money and the state thinks they can solve problems by taxing, taxing and more taxing, with a lot of mandatory fees to go with it. The state raised state taxes in the first place because they know they can and in fact, over half the state income taxes come from the 1% here. California also pays obscene federal taxes and gets little back from the federal government relatively speaking because the federal tax rate is standardized across the country, so while making $200,000 is a lot of money in most states, in many parts of California ie all of the Bay Area and even SoCal where average house prices are ~$700k, that’s barely enough to pay for the basics (especially when you figure in state taxes, property taxes, and other high costs of living), but you’re still in the same tax bracket, paying the same Federal taxes as someone in Texas making $200,000/year where with that much money you’d live in a mansion like a king - no state income tax and housing prices currently average $177k in Texas (barely a downpayment in California).Incidentally, with the change in the tax code to disallow state and local taxes deductions from federal taxes, the California state legislature is scrambling to figure out how they’re going to keep the insane CA state income tax revenue. Remember 1% of the population pays just over half the state income taxes, if, say half of those 1% relocate to Nevada or Oregon or Idaho or Texas or Florida or wherever in the coming years, the whole house of cards falls extremely quickly as they’ll not only lose the income tax, but the corporate income tax those people work for, the property taxes, not to mention sales tax, DMV fees etc. Those that are left in California will be expected to cough up more money to make up for it."Top 1 Percent" Pays Half of State Income TaxesEven for the next 6 years while the tax rates are “lowered” for most of the country, upper middle class and up Californians are effecitvely getting tax hikes in 2018 due to the removal of SALT deductions, but by 2025, I and many others will be long gone from California because by that point the taxes will be astronomical for those left.There’s another facet to this that I think surprisingly few people understand. California has really tried to help the poor. Problem is that the more you try to help the poor, the more incentive you are effectively giving poor people to come here (or to remain/become poor in some cases). This makes it so there’s perpetually more poor people than you can handle.Here’s an interesting report I found about California migration.California MigrationHere’s the summaryThe report's main findings include:California experienced a negative net domestic migration of 625,000 from 2007 to 2014. In other words, 625,000 more people moved out of California to other states than moved in to California from other states.The vast majority of the out-migrants went to just five states: Texas, Oregon, Nevada, Arizona, and Washington.Californians 25 years of age and over that do not possess four-year college degrees accounted for over 469,800 out-migrants. However, California was actually a net importer of nearly 52,700 residents with a bachelor's degree or higher.California remains the top state attracting international migrants, many of which are low-income earners and those that have obtained a bachelor's degree.So basically you end up with 2 kinds of people coming here. People (foreign and domestic) who are educated and want to come here because there’s wealthy industries and money to be made (ie tech, Hollywood, music, innovation start ups in general) and low income people that are coming because it’s a liberal state that’s going to take from those high income earners and help you out. There’s entire sections of cities where people don’t speak a word of English, they only speak Hmong, or Spanish, or Punjabi, or Aramaic. My sister works at a bank where every couple of weeks hundreds of Hmong line up at her bank collecting their welfare checks (not to make this about race, I’m sure there’s even more white people, but that’s what she tells me).However, at the same time you’ve got an absolute ton of (probably mostly white) people pursuing the American dream that are moving out, not because it’s not a lovely state with lovely weather, but because they can’t afford to buy a house, pay the crazy taxes and raise a family here. They can move to Nevada or Arizona and make $35,000–50,000/year and be totally fine.What this ends up doing is causing a crazy housing market due to so many high paying jobs combined with geographically and politically limited land in the Bay Area and SoCal combined with many wealthy foreign buyers.It also ends up with a huge poor population. The juxtaposition of these two types of people with high housing prices leads to a very liberal state with a crazy wealth disparity and, adjusted for cost of living, the highest percent of poor people in the country according to politifact.TRUE: California has the nation’s highest poverty rateThat’s a head scratcher for most people, but hopefully after reading this answer, not for you.

Having worked extremely hard in extremely difficult customer service and sales jobs (door to door, telephone surveys, and much worse) where I was making about $6–8/hr I always cringed at the thought of tipping $5–10 for someone who wrote down my order and walked my plate out from the kitchen. One of my best friends worked as a server and was driving a perpetually new car, wore designer clothes and paid rent while I worked outside in the sun and cold getting yelled at selling newspaper subscriptions, etc. I lived at home, shopped at Good Will and drove my parents periwinkle minivan when they let me. We were the exact same age and both had gone to the same school and had the same education level and skillset (read: none).Servers making $100k/year it actually insane.I feel like I’d personally go out to eat much more often if I didn’t have to pay an extra 20% tip.