BG, I think you’re making things out to be much worse than they actually are. Average class size at the CSU campuses are mostly around 30 for lower division classes, and much lower than that for upper division classes. Students CAN graduate in less than 6 years, and at most campuses more than 1/2 of the students do graduate in 6 years or less. Kids can get lost and take longer, but motivated students don’t have to. The difficulty in getting classes really doesn’t sound significantly different than when I was at SDSU and had to crash almost every class my first 3 years. It took me 5 years to graduate, but that was with 4 changes to my major. Which I suspect, is exactly why the current crop is often taking longer than 4 years. My daughter recently graduated from UCSD in 4 years. A couple of summer school classes, and she could have done it in 3 1/2. But she picked out her major when she was 7.

I’m not sure how there’s a big advantage to that “smaller four-year colleges in which each student has an academic counselor chained to their ankle (and iphone, etc) and the typical class sizes are under 25 students”. More likely than not, it’s a private school with costs that far exceed the resident cost for either the CSU or UC system.